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Re: syntax
> (Nick Nicholas, live from Whatchammy City)
> Quoth Veijo Vilva
>> {cripu ke fraso zbasu}
>> {cripu je fraso zbasu}
>> How do we interpret these phrases?
>> {cripu ke fraso zbasu}
> a bridge-related French builder
>> {cripu je fraso zbasu}
> a bridge-related and French builder
>I'm not disputing this analysis (indeed, I sort of hinted at it
>myself); I was rather pointing out the following:
>a) the most obvious way a builder can be related to bridges is by
>building them;
>b) this interpretation is untenable in the above phrases, if you also
>claim the builder is French.
>If, however, you claim the relation between "French" and "builder" is
>other than adjunct (for example, a builder of French things)... well,
>even then I doubt you could claim the builder built bridges.
>The problem I'm having is, how can {cripu} be an adjunct. At this
>point, my Esperanto can help out; "ponta konstruanto" is not
>equivalent to "pontkonstruanto". The semantics of a bridge as an
>adjunct are still quite vague to me, though; the best I can see is
>"bridge" being a locative.
It ought to have been quite obvious to me from the beginning.
There is a quite common situation where a bridge built is an
adjunct: if we are not talking about bridges in general but a
certain bridge, e.g. 'Here you see our new bridge. The bridge's
French builder lives in our city.' The word "bridge's" is an
adjunct which can be elided without changing either the meaning
or the grammaticality of the sentence. (I think in Esperanto it
would be quite legitimate to use "ponta konstruanto" in a case
like this.) In this case 'cripu ke fraso zbasu' would be appropriate
I think. If we elide the word "fraso" it might be advisable to
retain the "ke". Then we should have:
ripyzpa bridge builder
cripu zpasu bridge builder or
something-to-do-with-bridges builder
cripu ke zbasu the bridge's builder
In Finnish we have a quite similar situation:
silta (gen. sillan) bridge
rakentaja (gen. rakentajan) builder
ranskalainen (gen. ranskalaisen) French
sillanrakentaja a bridge builder
sillan rakentaja the bridge's builder
In the latter case 'sillan' is a genitive attribute
defining the object of the building operation.
ranskalainen sillanrakentaja a French bridge builder
fraso ripyzba
fraso ke cripu zbaso
sillan ranskalainen rakentaja the bridge's French builder
cripu ke fraso zbasu
In this case in Finnish it wouldn't be correct
to swap the words 'sillan' and 'ranskalainen'
unless someone wanted to put a very strong
emphasis on the word 'sillan'.
ranskalainen silta (gen. ranskalaisen sillan, note the
concord) the French bridge
ranskalaisen sillan rakentaja the French bridge's builder
fraso cripu ke zbasu
(Sadly, quite many of the younger generation cannot clearly
differentiate between e.g. 'sillanrakentaja' and 'sillan
rakentaja', perhaps under the growing influence of English.
You see more and more examples where people just put words in
a row thus completely destroying the meaning, especially in ads
translated from English. There is even a school of thought
which maintains that we ought to adopt the English way as the
Finnish way is 'too' difficult for 'most' people to master
properly - read: including the advocates themselves.)
(Technical jargon in English also has, of course, strings of words
which cannot be parsed in any sensible way. Languages like
Finnish and German can usually avoid these with sometimes quite
monstrous concatenations of words - artificially constructed
examples having 100+ letters and real ones very often 20-30 letters
in a single word.)
In 'cripu je fraso zbasu' (which I should consider syntactically
correct though I might insert "ke" for clarity => 'cripu je fraso
ke zbasu') I feel that in most cases "fraso" would dictate the
semantics : 'a (something-to-do-with-bridges and French) builder'
as 'a builder of {bridges|the bridge} and French things' seems
to me slightly far fetched. I don't think anyone would try to
connect "the bridge" and "being French" (which in a sense would
be even ungrammatical).
In Finnish we can have
tien- ja sillanrakentaja = dagjevripyzba
a road-and-bridge builder
tien ja sillan rakentaja = dargu je cripu [ke] zbasu
the builder of the road and
the bridge
This is actually the only way in Finnish so the Lojban forms
I have used would feel quite natural to us -- and to Japanese
people who would perhaps prefer to keep the "ke" to remind of
the "no" of the Japanese genitive.
The question of the semantics of the tanru is quite complicated
and my interpretation has been very strongly influenced by my
native language. It is, however, an existing natural language
with non-artificial parallel expression models and I see no
reason not to take this model into account when we are creating
guidelines for Lojban tanru pragmatics. (I am not, however,
advocating the wholesale adoption of the Finnish practice as it
would redefine the distinction between tanru and lujvo.)
The distinction between complements and adjuncts isn't always
very clear and different languages have different rules governing
the surface structure even if we sometimes are able to say that
the deep structure is similar or even identical. Even if 'cripu'
can be used to fill the 2nd sumti place of 'zbasu' and so would
normally be a complement, separating it from 'zbasu' in a tanru
(e.g. with 'ke' or 'fraso') would allow a looser (adjunct)
connection and thus widen the scope of possible useful expressions.
It is impossible to define a grammar for a natural (or nearly
enough so to be practical) language such that it can always
definitely tell whether a sentence is 'grammatically correct'
(Goedel). The law of diminishing returns dictates that you must
draw the line somewhere when you try to account for various
phenomena. In a constructed language the syntax can be very
precisely defined but the question always remains as to which
depth. There are many contradicting goals: the grammar ought
to be manageable, allow enough expressive power, prune as many
'impossible' sentences as possible etc. Forbidding outright the
combination of certain classes of words in certain ways (e.g.
"rel-bridge and rel-French") is, of course, possible but
probably not the correct way to proceed.
Must a bridi like "mi vasxu loi gerku" be tagged grammatically
incorrect or considered syntactically correct but semantically
non-sense? Quite many grammarians would say its incorrect but
I should be inclined to disagree. In Lojban, of course, it would
be a question of the restrictions imposed upon the 2nd sumti
place of 'vasxu', is it syntax or semantics? And if we require
that x2 is a mass word, does it impose a restriction upon the
nature of the mass involved? Or does the Lojban mass abstraction
somehow sidestep the whole issue?
Veijo