No Subject

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

Date: Thu, 12 Aug 93 12:10:06 CST
From: u7911005@cc.nctu.edu.tw
Apparently-To: <lojbab@grebyn.com>

>                              as I noted, some speakers are starting to
>turn modal predicates like "possible" into VSO order even at the expense
>of the more highly marked form.  A couple of people who do this and are
>linguistically aware explain this in terms of moving a heavy clause to
>the end of the sentence to reveal the predicate more quickly and easily.

The same happens in both English and Chinese; for example:
        Reading this sentence is easy.
        It is easier to read this one.
The "It is" acts as the "mark".

>It has been argued that speaking a language like Lojban is very much
>speaking a language whose deep structure matches the surface structure.

This holds if the deep structure is based on some kind of predicate
logic (maybe the Chomsky kind) -- which, at least in my case, is true.

>What this means for linguistic theories if Lojban develops 'native
>speakers' i.e. children who can learn the language through natural
>processes, is to me an interesting question.

This question is always interesting for every artificial language, but
it is even more so for Lojban because of its rather close relation with
logic.

>In Lojban the parentheses that group the structures are explicitly spoken
>except when not necessary because no ambiguity results under the formal
>grammar (defined under LALR1 rules with YACC).

I have noticed that, in more technical- or computer-interested groups of
people, there is a tendency to "borrow" useful linguistic devices from
other human & computer languages.  When I speak Chinese with my friends,
I would often end a sentence with English "which" -- then continue to
speak Chinese.  This is because there is no linguistic device in Chinese
corresponding to the English "which", *which* is very useful.
Parentheses are also pretty often borrowed into Chinese in our chatting.

>The acquisition (thus far only in adults of course) of the rules for
>when elision of parentheses is permitted and/or desirable may prove to
>be revealing of some aspects of how our brains process the predicate
>structures that comprise the language.

Yes; investigation this acquisition process would be very interesting.

>As I said, we have for each defined predicate some fixed number of
>mandatory arguments, and a mechanism through case tags of adding
>additional optional arguments.  There are also mechanisms that define
>'new' case tags via relative clauses, though these are rarely used.
>Lojban has a lot of bells and whistles built in specifically to find out
>which things are necessary to speakers, which are optional, and which
>just cannot be acquired naturally.

Comparing to English:  In English there are at most 3 mandatory
arguments, which are called the subject, the direct object, and the
indirect object (repectively).  If there is a preposition between the DO
and IO, it signals the exchange of the two objects.  Each language has
its own choice between making an argument mandatory or optional:
Smalltalk and Chinese take at most two arguments for each predicate
(S+V+O == O1+V+O2).  Lojban, in comparison, takes more mandatory
arguments than most (natural) languages -- which in turn makes usage of
case tags less often.  I think case tags in Lojban are like prepositions
in English?


>In Lojban we could not even say this much.  Nouns may also have
>arguments in Lojban (and I suspect in other languages as well) For
>"sheriff", the obvious arguments are the person who fills the role, and
>the place he is sheriff of:  sheriff(John(), Nottingham()).  So
>[arrest(sheriff(John(), Nottingham()), Charlie())] would seem to be the
>formalism I want.  In Loglan/Lojban we attach the Nottingham onto the
>sheriff easily, and in a way identical to an option way of attaching
>arguments to the main predicate (verb).  Using English content words in the
>Lojban, this gives:

>le sheriff be la Nottingham bei fa la John    cu arrest be la Charlie.
>   noun       noun"object"      noun "subject"
>----------------------------------------------   ------ -------------
>               verb subject                      verb      verb object

John, who sheriffs at Nottingham, arrests Charlie.  Huh?  So when we say
"the sheriff of Nottingham", we mean "that which is the sheriff of
Nottingham".  ("is the sheriff of" should be a single word in Lojban, I
guess?)

>However, my statements are a little misleading, because in analysis we
>came to a different conclusion.  'Nouns' in Lojban, which are the
>arguments of the various predicates expressed in the language, are
>either names (i.e. labels), pronouns, or "descriptions", which
>themselves are verbs WHICH ARE EXPRESSED IN TERMS OF THEIR FIRST
>ARGUMENT. i.e.  "Sheriff of Nottingham" is a reference to the first
>argument of the function 'Sheriff()', which is the person filling the
>job.  We are describing that person by expressing another verb about him
>wherein he serves the first argument.

Let me, in the following reply, refer to "nouns which themselves are
verbs WHICH ARE EXPRESSED IN TERMS OF THEIR FIRST ARGUMENT" as "noun
phrases."

Okay...  In English there is the word "of", which serves as a shorthand
device -- "A of B" stands for "that which is-the-A-of B" -- but in
Lojban, since is-the-A-of is a single word, I wonder if there is still
something corresponding to the English "of" -- or do we have to say
"that which is-the-A-of B"?  If it's the latter case, then "the sheriff"
would become "that which is-the-sheriff-of zo'e".

>It is abnormal therefore to express the first argument of such a noun
>overtly as I did in more early pseudo-Lojban sentence mentioning "John",
>Though it is permitted.  Normally in English (I don't know about other
>natural languages), an appositive is used to express such a first
>argument since it is just ANOTHER expression of the same first argument
>that the descriptive argument itself is providing.  Lojban allows it in
>all three ways:  as appositive, relative clause/phrase, or attached as a
>direct expression of the first argument as I did in my pseudo-Lojban
>above.

I'm sorry about my ignorance in linguistics, but what does "appositive"
and "relative clause/phrase" mean?

>Interesting about this analysis is that it assigns a special grammatical
>role to the first argument - i.e. it is what enables a verb to be turned
>into a noun, (or actually, a predicate into an argument).

As long as exchanging the places of arguments (both mandatory and
optional) is allowed, this special role of the first argument makes no
difference.

>John sheriffs at Nottingham.
>     --------
>The eye blues according to some standard.
>        -----

Yeah, I think I begin to get it now.

>And Lojban indeed avoids some ambiguities of natural language through
>this practice, though far more are avoided by the structures of the
>formal grammar, which genrally act as parentheses that may be elided
>when unnecessary.

They have always told us why the invention of zero is so important to
both math and non-math, but (sob) nobody thought to hail the person who
invented parentheses.  :)

>Note that we get a special definition for "subject" based on its logical
>position, but otherwise the distinction is between predicate=function
>and argument=object.  Lojban thus can be attributed an ordering by
>saying that an argument being a subject is thereby not an object, while
>all the rest of the objects keep that label.
>
>By this rather arbitrary standard the unmarked order for Lojban is
>either SVO or SOV with preference generally determined by the order of
>ones natural language (hence most commonly SOV due to English influence,
>these days, but it doesn't have to be.)  But the markings necessary to
>support any of the other orders is relatively minimal, and, for example,
>certain predicates (those which in English are expressed as subjectless
>modals, e.g "It's possible that I am coming" are often expressed in VSO
>order even though the form is marked by a single word.  But this
>abnormal order is not mandatory.

Yes...  Actually I suppose that Lojban can even be SOVO, in the case of
>=3 arguments.

>Because, as you may know from the Scientific American article on Loglan,
>Chinese played a significant role in the creation of the set of root
>words for the language according to a weighted phoneme algorithm, Lojban
>words are supposed to have a decided Chinese flavor to them.  But with
>no Chinese speakers of the language, we don't know whether the high
>Chinese "recognition scores" really mean anything to a Chinese learner.

Well, IMO the Chinese recognition scores did help a bit.  Often we can
put the Chinese and English for a concept together and get a pretty good
approximation of the Loglan/Lojban word.  :)  A question on the
word-making:  What is the difference between the word-making processes
of Loglan and Lojban, which made the two vocabularies different?

>We thus are especially interested in encouraging anything that will open
>doors into China, both Taiwan and the mainland, to gain access to the
>enormous and possibly extremely interested potential speaker-base.  Any
>help you could give us in this, recruiting additional people there to
>learn the language, distributing copies of any material we send you to
>them (possibly splitting the cost if you are paying - we do not charge
>for permission to copy and distribute our materials in other countries
>so such cost-sharing may make it easier for long-term involvement in the
>Lojban community), helping us get materials translated into Chinese and
>getting such materials distributed, and formal research that leads to
>published linguistics and NLP papers in which Lojban plays a significant
>part, are all factors that would make us extremely interested in working
>with you.

I do have several friends who are interested in Loglan/Lojban, and of
course I will send them copies of the materials.  Translation into
Chinese should be easy.  I don't know much about linguistics research,
but I am surely looking forward to distributing information in both
China and Taiwan.

>Assuming you are knowledgeable about Chinese and other languages that we
>are weak in, you may also provide us insights from the perspective of
>that language that are not easily seen from an English/Indo-European
>perspective.

I will work hard on that, but first of all I would like to learn Lojban,
so I think I'll send you my order form shortly.

Thank you for spending so much time responding.