Lojban pan-predication (was: Re: This Chemical Element Stuff)

[cbmvax!uunet!math.ucla.edu!jimc]

> Date:  Thu, 02 May 91 13:40:04 +1000
> From:  nsn@mullian.ee.mu.OZ.AU
> Subject:  This Chemical Element Stuff
   
> * * * lots omitted 
> What's that? Whorf alert? well who cares - to me Lojban seems a lot more
> like an investigation of Predication analysis of lexical item - to have
> all lexical items as predications in surface structure may well be 
> interesting.

Hear, hear!  Old Loglan and its offspring Lojban are based on the idea 
that brivla are symbols for relations and (in jimc's words) a relation 
is a set of N-tuples consisting of thus-related objects.  For example, 
citka has as one of its members (my pet rat; my piece of cheese), and 
it has a lot of other members of the same ilk.  

Given this bias it is natural to turn it around and say that ONLY 
relations have "true" meaning, or in other words, unless a syntactic
structure can be transformed to represent some kind of relation it is
beyond the reach of semantic analysis and will be thrown out as a mere
paralinguistic grunt.  I strongly subscribe to this point of view, and
this is why I have argued that various syntactic structures ought to be
considered as abbreviations for relative clauses or various other 
relation-based structures.  

The windmill of the goddamned freemod still turns.  However, John Cowan 
has expressed an interest in entering the tanru into the lists.  Soon...
Thanks, Nick, for giving me an opportunity to put out a kind of 
rationale for "lawful compounds", that is, interpreting most tanru as
surface structures that represent specific relation-based deep 
structures.

		-- jimc