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Reading the Lexical Semantics essay got me thinking about philophies of design for loglangs and interlangs (katanda being both of these). In all the various sketches for loglangs that I've made over the years, one principle is pretty constant: That the language should not force the user to include particular information in their utterances. Esperanto, for instance, has no way to avoid including mention of tense and aspect. The verb suffixes are mandatory, so the user can't avoid telling the listener about when the described events occured. Most proposed auxlangs make an obligatory distinction of number in their nouns (and usually adjectives). English has two voices - active and passive - which indicate the relative importance of subject, object, and oblique cases. So if the speaker wants to (say) make the instrument of an action the most important of the noun phrases, and omit the patient altogether (as unimportant, obvious, or unknown), they can only do it by cumbersome circumlocution and idiom. More than that, there is no way of simply omitting information about ranking of case roles. Even in Katanda, there is always a ranking order (given by the voice changing morphemes), whether the speaker wants one or not. If I had the time and energy to design an interlang, I'd allow for constructions that expressed the following: * Agent does something unspecified to an unknown patient, using a coconut. * A coconut is thrown in a street, the street being very important, and the unknown agent more important than the coconut. * An act of throwing occurs, beginning in the future and continuing. * On tuesday, in the street, with a coconut, in the rain, something will happen, resulting in a broken window. No doubt Katanda can handle all such constructions, but some more easily than others, because some arguments are expected as core arguments, and others are not. I suppose what I'm asking is: Why does Katanda have core arguments at all? -- Kapitano