Re: [saweli] Saweli Dictionary

 

For example, I often thought that the Lojban place strucures were fairly arbitrary. Why would one argument be an agent while another an abstraction? And for that matter, I think that Rick Morneau himself provides a good example of a root that he reuses extensively, "zog". 

The argument structure is just an entry point into most concepts, and when people impose a default structure onto a concept I often think that it's because they are trying to map it onto the root that their own language provides. But that is what the Lojbanists would call a "forced choice". You might find that some concepts lend themselves more easily to some argument structures than others, but I would argue that the argument structure is every bit as much a part of the concept as any "root" (which is to say that there is no true "root" distinct from its argument structure) and it would then be interest to see how much the meaning of the innermost morpheme can change depending on the different argument structures that you give it.