Re: VSO order

[cbmvax!uunet!MATH.UCLA.EDU!pucc.PRINCETON.EDU!jimc]

Lojbab writes, in response to Mark Shoulson responding to Dean Gahlon:
> I'm going to interpolate what you are proposing as being that
>
>                      citka le nanmu le cripu
> should be                  x1       x2
> and not the current        x2       x3       with x1 unspecified
>
> in other words, you want an >unmarked< VSO order...

Lojbab gives two reasons why Lojban needs the special pre-selbri x1
treatment.  I thought it might be useful to outline how these problems
are dealt with in -gua!spi, allowing the desired unmarked VSO.

First, in an S-bridi (the bridi in a sumti), why should the first sub-
sumti go in x2 rather than x1, which in Lojban is considered to be
empty?  Because it's not empty!  A placeholder anaphor is there; the
-gua!spi parser actually creates the word and sticks it in.  The reason
it's there is to let users know what the sumti means, like this (in
-gua!spi, remember):

Let's take "lo se citka be loi mlatu" representing "cat food", perhaps
not optimally but it makes a good example.  "citka" represents a
relation between an eater and an eatee; such a relation is a list of
pairs, the first member of each of which eats, and the second being
eaten.  Now retain only members consistent with subphrases, if any; in
this case x1 has to be the mass cat (whatever that means, but that's
another thread).  One of the places will be occupied by the placeholder
anaphor, either because the parser inserted it or the user said it
explicitly (very rare).  Collect the relation members in that place
into a set, and modify according to the determiner / article "lo" (i.e.
keep them all and unroll in extension).  The result is the referent set
of the sumti.  The placeholder anaphor has that set as its referent,
and in semantic analysis whenever you need the sumti's referents you
link to the anaphor.  Not to any other word in the sumti.

Thus the placeholder anaphor has an essential role in semantic analysis.
But being there, it makes natural the idea that any sub-sumti cannot
occupy x1 (after conversion) because the placeholder is already in it.

Lojbab's second justification for treating x1 specially is that very
frequently in an abstraction there will be an "implicit" x1 which a
common-sense listener will understand is the same as one of the main
bridi arguments.  For example,

        mi  fengu le mlatu   le nu citka  lemi sanmi
        I'm angry at the cat for   eating my   food (meal)

Clearly the eater is the cat, but in Lojban this sumti is invisible to
the parser and so under an unmarked VSO policy, "lemi sanmi" would
wrongly end up in citka x1.

In -gua!spi the parser does know about the internal sumti because the
dictionary entry for fengu (angry) tells it to replicate x2 into the x3
abstraction.  Thus again, "lemi sanmi" goes into x2 because x1 isn't
empty!

This kind of replication instruction is very common, and even applies
to x2 of the abstraction in a few cases, mainly comparisons. The
speaker can, but rarely does, suppress replication by putting an
explicit zo'e or other sumti in the target place.   It is my opinion
that the kind of common-sense implicit replication contemplated in
Lojban is not robust enough to allow solid logical analysis of the
resulting bridi; clearly specified algorithmic rules are necessary.

This is why -gua!spi never is bothered by the place-assignment
objections Lojbab makes to the unmarked VSO idea.  Lojbab also points
out, correctly, that the observative is a very basic kind of sentence
and deserves low overhead support, perhaps more so than the unmarked
VSO with explicit x1, which is what I am trying to make to work in
Lojban.  Nick made a suggestion, which I agree with, that the only
problem comes up when an explicit x2 is present; under an unmarked VSO
policy it needs "fe" just as under present policy x1 needs "fa", like
this:

        Unmarked VSO            Present policy          English
        carvi                   carvi (no change)       It's raining
        carvi fe mi             carvi mi                I'm getting rained on
        carvi le se baktu       carvi fa le se baktu    It's raining buckets

So in the observative arena the burden is shifted from one
not-so-common usage pattern to another similarly rare, while the burden
is taken off of a pattern I use a lot in non-observative situations.

                -- jimc