RE: Relatives and Quantifiers

[cbmvax!uunet!OASIS.ICL.CO.UK!I.Alexander.bra0122]

              I've got kind of mixed feelings about this, Colin.

              First of all, let me point out that the latest Diagrammed
         Grammar Summary appears to support one of your proposals.  At the
         bottom of page 19, it describes a "description sumti" as

         [number] le [number] [sumti] [modal] selbri [ku]

         which is your solution (c) to problem 2.

              I've put that up front so that LLG have chance to notice it
         and comment whether it's a typo.


              In general, however:  there is no rule that says that the
         deep(er) structure of a language (natural, artificial, computer,
         whatever) has to correspond to the surface structure.  (This is
         obvious, isn't it.)

              On the other hand, it is kind of nice if it does,
         particularly if it's easy.  This is particularly true when you've
         got people like myself who have access to the grammar definition,
         which gives the syntax, but tells you essentially nothing about
         the semantics of any given construction.
              Some of it we intuit from the corresponding English language
         construction - we are after all still a predominantly English-
         language group - but this is in itself dangerous.  Many of the
         discussions I've seen or been involved in recently (and some I've
         never started, because I saw what was going on in time) have been
         a result of confusing an English gloss for a Lojban definition -
         mainly of gismu rather than grammar rules, but then there are more
         of the former, and the negation inside / outside quantifier
         discussion is a good example of grammar or meta-grammar.
              There's a lot of stuff in the language which needs careful
         definition, which is a lot of work, and it's not even obvious how
         you can best present some of it.  The discursive papers are good,
         but they only tell you what they tell you;  they're good to read
         through, but not ideal reference material.

              In any case, I think I'm saying that although your concerns
         are theoretically unimportant, in practical terms they are
         extremely reasonable, and I am in favour of any such
         rationalisation which makes it easier to get to grips with the
         grammar - I would need to read it all through again before
         committing myself to any of your particular solutions.  But this
         is coupled with a warning that much of the grammar, possibly even
         including this part after your improvements, needs semantic
         clarification, and we as a group need to find some way of handling
         this.