Re: JimC on Colin on JimC on Frank's easy text

[John Cowan <cowan@SNARK.THYRSUS.COM>]

la kolin. cusku di'e

> Re observatives: I wrote an essay about VSO a few months ago,
> pointing out that Lojban could be changed to VSO with no
> syntactic change, and by altering (not adding or removing)
> one rule of interpretation.
> [viz:
> At present: the first unmarked positional sumti is numbered 1
> unless it follows the selbri, when it is numbered 2. This applies
> in all contexts.
> New rule: the first unmarked positional sumti is numbered 1
> except inside selgadri, where it is numbered 2.]

Nope.  Your new rule breaks things like "le nanmu poi klama le zarci", because
that ends up meaning "the man such-that the store goes [to him?]".
You need to say something like "except in subordinated bridi and bridi-oids"
(a selgadri isn't a bridi, although it is clearly derived from one).

>  The semantics of observatives are not very clear, and as
> I said before many writers are frequently omitting x1 to generate
> what are technically (syntactically) observatives, and
> semantically sentences with elided x1's.

I'm not clear on the distinction you are making here.  If a sentence has
no x1, it is an observative in every sense.  It may be that the x1 is
supplied from some other piece of linguistic behavior rather than from
the non-linguistic context (specifically, the previous bridi), but what
of that?

> Particularly common are:
> 1) elided x1's in narrative:
>  le ctuca cu cadzu .i viska le tixru .i terpa tu'ari
> 2) elided x2's together with conversion or explicit marking
> to get a heavy clause afterwards:
> cumki falenu mi clira seixruti
> (or) se cumki lenu mi clira seixruti

I agree that 2) is a poor example of an observative; grammatically, it
fits the observative mold, but semantically it is no observative.

--
John Cowan      cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban.