Response on relatives and quantifiers

[CJ FINE <cbmvax!uunet!bradford.ac.uk!C.J.Fine>]

I've read responses from Ian, John, Bob and Veijo, and I haven't changed
my views.

First, a clarification of intent. Veijo in particular seems to have
assumed that my intent was to find a way to say certain things in
Lojban. This is not so. I was analysing the existing structure of the
language, trying to understand it and see its semantics, and I came
across an area where the syntactic structure does not match what I
believe to be the *current* semantic (or logical) structure. It is
likely that my interpretation of this semantic structure is at least in
part derived from my intuitions as an English speaker; but I do my best
to avoid this.

So I was a little hurt by Veijo's implication that I was coming from
the point of view of translation - old Loglanists will know that I have
been assiduous in questioning malglico for years.

Anyway, to specific comments:

As Iain and Bob rightly point out, it is not essential that the deep
structure/ semantic parse follow the surface structure; but it is highly
desirable. I also believe that getting this sort of disparity
straightened out is a valuable step in the process of understanding what
we mean and what we are skating over in learning and talking Lojban -
for me probably the foremost attraction of the language.

Bob on "ci le vo la djan. pu jibri ku":
=====================================
 - as Iain pointed out, this means "Three of the four Johns were jobs",
and indeed the grammar does not allow a quantifier to the
pseudo-possessive (sumti-4/sumti_E_96)

John:
=====

My statement in section 1 that "lo sipna noi melbi" means that all
sleepers are beautiful, is of course wrong according to what we (want it
to) mean. My argument precisely is that if you follow the parse, it does
mean that, because it parses as
	(su'o) [lo sipna [noi melbi]]
with the (implied) quantifier unequivocally outside the scope of the
relative.

It is true that I did not specifically discuss relative clauses with
non-descriptive sumti; however I did not ignore them:

My contention is that *as a matter of current fact* we interpret
relative clauses with non-descriptions as (necessarily) outside the
sumti (but inside the (external) quantifier),
whereas we interpret relative clauses with descriptions as inside the
sumti and the internal quantifier. (I am ignoring incidentals here,
which are currently a problem, as I explained).

Thus
	ci da poi sipna
means
	ci [da poi sipna]
	three (out of) (those x who are sleepers)

but
	lo ci prenu poi sipna
means
	lo [ci [prenu poi sipna]]
	some ((persons who are sleepers) (incidentally there are three))

but our existing parse matches in the first case, but not the second. My
suggestion 1(c) is to change the syntax so that these two currently
valid sumti will still both be valid, but will parse reflecting the
semantics I have given.

Thus my proposal is not 'to separate incidental and restrictive clauses,
and to place the latter within the scope of "le ... ku"'. It is to
separate incidental and restrictive clauses, *and* to define two
different places of attachment for the latter: one within descriptions
and the other outside the sumti-4. All existing strings that do not
involve incidentals will remain valid, but they will parse differently
according as there is a description or not. As an extra, it will be
possible to place the restrictive string outside the description
explicitly (and therefore outside the internal quantifier) by using "KU".

I am not happy about your description of the semantic processing of
relative clauses as a block. I considered this as one possibility, but I
notice that Veijo strongly favoured the other possibility, where the
order of the clauses is significant. (I return to this below when I
discuss his paper). I am also unconvinced by your assertion that they
are necessarily associative and commutative because sentence logical
connection is so. This might be persuasive if we were just talking about
the "poi" series, but the intensionality of "voi" completely screws
that argument. There is no requirement for a pair of successive
*subjective* restrictions on the set of possible objects even to commute.

Your explanation of the effect of "da poi" is very clear, and more
succinct than my own. We are in complete agreement. Further, your
discussion of "ke'a" exactly demonstrates my point: that logically
restrictive and incidental clauses belong at different places in the
parse.

Obviously, I don't agree that "relative-clauses" is too far down in the
hierarchy - it is both too far down and not low enough. Incidentally,
the fact that it appears twice is purely a requirement of mabla indefinite
descriptions.


As others have since said, "lo ci mi broda" is not a sumti but a bridi.
To my mind this is yet another reason for getting rid of the bare
pseudo-possessive. Your argument that "mi" gets pulled out and
transformed into the relative-clauses block is only persuasive if you
believe in the relative-clauses block, which I don't. Further, while I
would be keen to have a transformational description of the
language, I would vastly prefer one limited to transformations
within the syntactic structure, not just of surface strings; ie that did
not allow shifts into or out of constituents, as this would require.

Thanks for your support on ciboi mu denmikce. "Space the bastard".

Veijo
=====

Much of your paper is valid in its own right, but not an answer to mine,
as I have said above. For example "le ci le sipna poi mi nelci ke'a" is
fine to express what you say; my argument was about the *actual* meaning
of "le ci sipna poi mi nelci ke'a".

I agree with you that the order of mixed relatives should be
significant; however, I believe that
	le prenu poi mi viska ke'a zi'egoi ko'a
will be much more common than
	le prenu goi ko'a zi'epoi mi viska

which is why I designed my proposal to allow the first to be said easily:
	*le prenu poi mi viska [ku'o] [ku] goi ko'a

I did not specifically consider how to say the second, but I assumed it
could be done (my note near the end of section 8) - and your suggestion
of nesting descriptions might well be the answer.

I have mixed feelings about your proposed extension to "lomi ci le
cukta".
On the one hand, I don't see why we shouldn't have it. On the other, as
Bob said in response to my earlier proposal about preposed relatives
"the pseudo-possessive is a special case, and not something to
generalise from". [My suggestion was not generalising from the
pseudo-possessive, but an independently motivated extension to reduce
what I think are unnecessary constraints on the order of constituent,
which *incidentally* happened to make a highly anomalous structure more
nearly regular - though not quite.]

Once again, I don't agree that "lomi ci cukta" does mean "[lo ci cukta]
pe mi" - I claim that *as we use it* it means "lo ci [cukta pe mi]".

I would like to end by reiterating the effect of my main proposal (1(c))
on existing texts, as there seems to have been some confusion:

1) Where restrictives and incidentals are not mixed, NO CHANGE
2) Where restrictives and incidentals are mixed, the incidentals have to
be moved to the end WITHOUT zi'e, and the restrictives terminated
(if necessary) by ku'o or ge'u
3) NO FURTHER CHANGE is required to distinguish internal and external
restrictives - they fall out naturally.

		Colin