Re: James Cooke Brown on SVO order

[C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK]

(John posted some text by JCB on SVO order)

It is remarkable how weak these arguments are, from the perspective of 25
years later.


Consider the following.

1. The major justification was in terms of imperatives. This was a strong
argument as long as "the only way of defining imperatives that is
consistent with the other patterns of an uninflected language" was to omit
the leading argument. But as John points out, we have an elegant and
flexible alternative method.  (JCB's original argument about imperatives
stressed the importance of minimal morphological material in them, and gave
examples from natural languages; but in fact there are plenty of evidence
of natural languages having for example 'polite' imperatives with more
morphology in them.)

2. Given that the omitted first place now signals an observative rather than
an imperative, the argument becomes feeble. Even if observatives had
continued to be used as apparently intended, statements such as "there
is apparently little scope for long-windedness in .... drawing the hearer's
attention to things in the environment" are highly dubious. It is true that
there are short observatives ("Delicious!") but equally there are long and
tortuous ones ("A man on a unicycle eating cream cakes!").
Furthermore, I observe that 'observatives' are not in practice limited to this
use in current Lojban writing and speaking, but that lojbo feel free to omit
the x1 in just the same way as they do any other argument. Indeed, constructions
like
        "cumki falenu ...."
(it is possible that ....)
where the x1 is postposed by an explicit x1 marker ('fa'), are syntactically
equivalent, and not unusual with words like 'cumki'.

Thus I would claim that in current Lojban usage, an observative is a syntactic
for