No Subject

[lojbab (Bob LeChevalier)]

Subject: Story of a Proposal - A Solution to Cleft Places & all the worlds' ills

1st of 6 related messages

A couple of weeks ago, I hinted that Nora and I had come up with an idea
about cleft place structures that we thought would solve that problem,
but we wanted to hear what people said about the problem first.  That
proposal died while you-all were discussing.  John Parks-Clifford and I
then developed a new solution on Sunday a week ago (2 hours on the
telephone beats a lot of letters - via email or otherwise).  This
solution had the additional benefits of tracking with linguistic
analysis of related phenomena in the natural languages, and also of
suggesting a solution to the nagging problems of indirect questions, the
place structure of "djuno", and providing some unintended niceties as
well.

Expertise in the language is not always a boon.  Last Tuesday, I
presented the solution to John Cowan, who thought it sounded OK, and to
the Lojban conversation group.  It took Sylvia Rutiser (far less
'expert' in Lojban than the rest of us) 2 minutes to find a big hole and
Nora 2 minutes longer to drive a truck through it and totally demolish
the idea.  Well, almost.  I came up with a little change (what is now
tu'a in the discussion below), which got around the problems and got the
idea back on track.  pc, Nora, John Cowan, and I agree this one might
work.  Do you agree?

John Cowan wrote up what became the following discussion for that
Tuesday review meeting.  He gets the credit for doing so, and for
generating the last debate on the topic, which occured when I went over
the plan with Athelstan on Friday.  Athelstan agreed in principle with
the package, but did not like the implications of John's wording of one
part of one line.  The result was a 2-hour discussion that lead to 2
alternatives, which we will now place before you-all for your opinions.

The discussion is broken into several messages due to length.  Please
read all of them before commenting, since comments in one may answer your
question in another.


Ready! Aim! Fire!

(Anyone who doesn't know what the cleft structure problem is, and cannot
figure it out from the proposal or the ensuing discussion should send me
a message, and I can send you my original posting describing the problem.
Warning - this is deep in the nitty-gritty of Lojban grammar and place
structure theory, and I rely in my discussion on people knowing our common
terminology used in Lojban grammar, and also that you have copies of the
grammar and cmavo list.)

Proposals:

1. Sumti Raising:

Natural language has a feature whereby the subject, or less frequently
the object, of a subordinate clause is brought out of that clause up to
the main level of the sentence, with the actual subordinate clause
deleted, and remaining only by implication from the remaining
subject/object.  This feature is called subject-raising or
object-raising, depending on what is 'raised' to the main level.

In Lojban, there is no difference between 'subject' and 'object',
because free rearrangement of arguments (sumti) using conversion with
selma'o SE can lead to any sumti being in the first 'subject' position.
The proposal thus generalizes 'sumti-raising'.  Initially, the proposal
intended sumti-raising to be unmarked - relying on semantic knowledge of
whether a given place in the place structure takes a concrete sumti or
an abstract sumti based on selma'o NU.  As an example of this earlier form:

        mi troci le  vorme            (1)
        I  try   the door.

based on the place structure of troci

        x1 tries to do/attain x2 by x3  (1a)

which I interpret as expanding to:

 x1 tries to bring about the event/state/process/activity x2 by method x3 (1b)

(1b) clarifies that x2 is an abstract clause.  I then view "le vorme" is
a sumti-raising from one of two possible x2 abstract sentences:

        mi troci lenu      mi karyri'a   le  vorme    (2)
        I  try   the-event I  open-cause the door.

        mi troci lenu      le  vorme cu kalri         (3)
        I  try   the-event the door     is-open.

(There is further possible complication in (2) in that rinka (cause),
the basis of "karyria" would normally take an event abstraction in its
x1 place, thus making the "mi" in that position a sumti-raising as well.
(2) thus can be further expanded to:

mi troci lenu lenu mi lacpu/catke le vorme cu rinka leka le vorme cu kalri
                                                   /lenu le vorme cu kalri


mi troci (lenu
I  try   the-event
     <lenu      mi lacpu/catke le  vorme>      cu rinka    (4)
      the event I  pull /push  the door           causes
     <leka            le  vorme cu kalri>)                 (4a)
      the-property-of the door     open(-ness)
    /<lenu         le  vorme cu kalri>)                    (4b)
     /the-event-of the door     is-open

and it can be seen in (4a) that (3) could be a kind of sumti-raising
wherein a property abstraction turns into an event abstraction.  It can also
be seen that there is semantic information lost in sumti raising - we don't
know in (2) whether pushing or pulling the door is necessary (or hitting
the elevator door button, for that matter)

There clearly is a lot of semantics hidden in "le vorme" in (1).

The flaw in sumti-raising as presented is revealed when we put the 'concrete'
sumti "le fasnu" in x2.  "le fasnu" appears to be concrete, but the x1 place
of fasnu being implied is the epitome of an event abstraction.  You cannot
assume that:

        mi troci le  fasnu
        I  try   the event.

is a sumti-raising.  The x2 value of this sentence represents the first
place of fasnu, which is itself an event abstraction.  Thus what looks
like a concrete sumti is really an abstract one.  "mulno" is even worse
- it means complete/whole, with 'complete' as the translation for x1 as
an event, and 'whole' as a translation for a concrete x1.  Sylvia
Rutiser noted that one who knits might talk about a sweater as being
whole (which is not sumti raising) or can say "the sweater is complete",
which is sumti raising from "The knitting of the sweater is complete."
The question of whether we are dealing with abstract or concrete sumti
suddenly becomes ambiguous without context; this kind of ambiguity,
while technically semantic in Lojban since there is no grammatical
difference between the two interpretations, is properly seen to be an
unacceptable GRAMMATICAL ambiguity, because we don't really know what
the ROLE of the words is without context.

On the other hand, sumti-raising is clearly valuable to Lojban speakers.
It allows brevity and makes the language seem more 'natural'.
sumti-raising also would answer the question as to how we interpret a
variety of bridi sentences in which the value in a sumti place seems not
to fit the formal place structure.  Finally, as we observed in the
expansion from (2) to (4), there are many levels at which sumti-raising
can creep in subconsciously - and we who are raised to speak natural
languages with implicit sumti-raising may be unable to eliminate these
subconscious lower levels of sumti raising.  In effect, then,
sumti-raising will be a part of Lojban whether we want it or not.
Better to recognize it and encourage it to be used properly, as in
solving the cleft structures problem.

The solution to the problem of determining that sumti-raising is
intended is to explicitly mark it, and the cmavo "tu'a" has been
proposed in selma'o LAhE to mark a sumti as indirectly indicating some
full subordinate abstract bridi that would fill the space.  (An unmarked
concrete sumti in a place that normally takes an abstraction would also
be taken as sumti raising per the above discussion - communication would
likely take place, but this would be a potential semantic error of the
type that can result with "mulno".  Thus we will not teach unmarked
sumti-raising as valid, and will discourage it when we notice it.)

That sumti-raising solves the cleft place structures problem is shown in the
following, from John Cowan:

    sumti-raising allows a concrete sumti (one not built on selma'o NU
    selbri) to appear where the place structure calls for an abstract sumti.
    This construct is taken as elliptical for "le NU <sumti> broda" for some
    NU and some broda.  Simple example:

            lenu          mi cinta cu galfi    le  bitmu
            The event-of (I  paint)   modifies the wall

            tu'a                 mi                  galfi    le  bitmu
            [The abstraction-of] I [doing something] modifies the wall.

    This allows uncleft place structures to mimic cleft ones for user
    convenience.

The consensus so far is that uncleft place structures are the preferred
way to go in Lojban.  sumti raising allows the full range of natural
language expression in an uncleft place structure language by explicitly
analytical means.

----
lojbab = Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
         2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA
         703-385-0273
         lojbab@snark.thyrsus.com