No Subject

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

From: u7911005@cc.nctu.edu.tw ()
Subject: Re: VSO languages? (was: Prefix languages?)
Organization: National Chiao Tung University
Date: Wed, 16 Jun 1993 12:53:47 GMT

> connolly@msuvx1.memst.edu said:
: The problem is considerably more complex.  Part of the problem is that
: linguists -- including me -- are too often tempted to make the traditional
: [...]
: What of subjects and objects?  Well, though subjects in languages of the
: normal Western European type, such as English, do tend to make the doer
: of the action (if there is one) the subject -- but they don't have to;
: it's perfectly OK to say "Charlie was arrested by the sheriff."

Here the subject and object of the sentence are reversed by the use of
passive voice.  Clearly, the meaning of "Charlie was arrested by the
sheriff" and "Charlie arrested the sheriff" is different.  I don't know
if linguistics consider "Charlie" or "sheriff" the "subject" of the
passive-voice sentence, but I think the "sheriff" is the "true" subject.

: What's a subject?  Very simple: a noun or pronoun which
: in some particular language gets this special treatment reserved for one
: noun or pronoun per clause -- whatever that treatment may be.

I see.  When we analyze a sentence using predicate logic (i.e.,
arrest(sheriff(), Charlie())), I think we can take everything as a
function, so:  A noun would be a function without arguments; and a verb
or an adjective would be a function with one or more arguments.  And the
"subject" would be the "first argument" of the verb function, which (as
you pointed out) doesn't have to be the "active argument" at all.

(Here, some particular "features" of English are making thinking
generally about all kinds of languages a bit more difficult.)

: Finally, someone else claimed in a post that the notion of "subject" may
: not apply in "ergative" languages such as Basque.  Ergative languages have
: subjects all right, but they identify them on different principles.  When
: a verb has a "doer" and a "receiver of the action", we would make the
: doer the subject -- they make the receiver the subject and give it exactly
: the same treatment they would give to the only noun in sentences such as
: _The children are running_, _The woman is tired_ etc.

Would that be a language with the "passive argument" always
being the "first argument" to the verb?

: Someone (if anyone is still reading) will jump on this and say that the
: doer of the action in active or ergative languages is the "syntactic
: subject".  There's no need for such a concept.  It turns out that in
: all the languages I know, two sorts of nouns and pronouns are syntacti-
: cally important: subjects in the sense that I have used the term, and
: the noun or pronoun which ranks highest in a semantic hierarchy -- what
: I called "most active" above.  These can just be called "highest ranking
: NP"; there's no particular reason to say they're a separate sort of
: subject, or (quod Deus avertat) the *only* subject.

: So: is a distinction between noun and verb necessary?  Apparently yes; at
: least, all languages make distinctions, though some much more clearly than
: others.

As I said above, the "everything's a function" (i.e., lambda calculus)
concept, when applied to designing (artificial) languages, can result in
no distinctions between nouns and verbs being needed.  For example, in a
postfix artificial language based on lambda calculus (where "postfix"
means "all the function arguments (if any) comes *before* the function
name), the sentence "The sheriff arrested Charlie" would become "Sheriff
Charlie arrest."  (Of course, the tenses of verbs are being ignored
here.)

Some kinds of ambiguity in English can be avoided this way.  For
example, the sentence "They are flying airplanes" have several different
meanings in (simplified) predicate logic:  "flying(they, airplanes)",
"be(they, flying(airplanes))", etc.  In the abovementioned postfix
language, these meanings would become:  "Fly airplanes they" and "They
airplanes flying be".

But (just as in any other language) the only way to *completely* avoid
ambiguity is to use parenthesis-like devices to denote the "number of
arguments" to each function.  The problem is that, given a certain
function, there might be different number of arguments to it, and there
are even "optional arguments" identified by "keywords/prepositions".
For instance:  "He gave."  "He gave it."  "He gave it to her."

Without parenthesis-like devices, the sentence "He saw the boy with a
telescope" == "saw(he, boy, use:telescope)" would also mean "saw(he,
have(boy, telescope))" -- the same ambiguity would still exist with the
sentence "he boy with:telescope saw".

: Are subjects and objects necessary?  Certainly not.  This is just one
: possible way to encode the difference between "doers" and "receivers of
: the action".  And in fact, not all languages have them.

Agree...  In fact, when I come to think of it, it is rather strange that
a number of languages *do* use the doer/receiver difference to
distinguish subjects and objects, and even more languages have the
distinction between subjects and objects.

: Are categorizations such as SVO justified?  Are they useful?  In general,
: yes -- but it gets really hairy when linguists start fighting about what
: is the "real" or "syntactic" subject of some sentence.  For instance,
: Spanish is said to be SVO, with the proviso that object *pronouns* must
: [...]
: So SVO and its ilk are sometimes accurate for a given language, sometimes
: misleading, though accidentlally right much of the time (as with Spanish),
: and sometimes, according to other posters, irrelevant.

Here I see three kinds of distinctions, all getting confused with
English:
    - subject/object
    - first argument/other arguments
    - before verb/after verb


To: u7911005@cc.nctu.edu.tw u7911005@[140.113.4.17]

I'm responding today because I just ran across your post on
comp.ai.nat-lang regarding subjects and objects, dated 16 Jun.

Your posting was interesting because in Loglan/Lojban it is indeed true
that there is little difference between a noun and a verb.  In your
post, you make the following definitions:

>When we analyze a sentence using predicate logic (i.e.,
>arrest(sheriff(), Charlie())), I think we can take everything as a
>function, so:  A noun would be a function without arguments; and a verb
>or an adjective would be a function with one or more arguments.  And the
>"subject" would be the "first argument" of the verb function, which (as
>you pointed out) doesn't have to be the "active argument" at all.

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

Note that in this case I expressed the 'subject' in 'VOS' order,
probably most natural if one were to actually express the sentence this
way in Lojban which is unlikely.  Rather, as in natural languages, we
tend to express further information about the noun in the form of
relative clauses or relative phrases that attach to the noun but analyze
independently from it.  Loglan/Lojban allows the option of going either
way.

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.

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.

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).  Thus we could
label this first argument "subject" and it would be useful and
meaningful as a label.  But in Loglan/Lojban, that first argument need
not be agent, passive, or any other particular semantic role in the
sentence - it just is the first argument of the referenced predicate,
whatever role may be played by that argument.  In most Lojban "active
verbs" the first argument is indeed an agent, but there are some where
it is not, and reordering the places is a simple grammatical function
with no defined semantics beyond that reordering (we label this
re-ordering "conversion", and its usual purpose is indeed to move an
argument not naturally in the first position to that position so it may
be used in an argument).  In Lojban words that equate to English nouns
or adjectives, the first argument is typically the thing that is
labelled by the noun or described by the adjective, but there are
usually other arguments defined as well (a standard or observer for many
'adjectives' for example).  But this is only when we look at these words
with an English eye.  For the sentences expressing sheriff(John,
Nottingham) and blue(eye, some_standard), we can look at these as verbs
just as easily as nouns or adjectives.  The resulting English is
strange, but understandable:

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

where I have underlined the odd verb form of the "noun" and "adjective"
respectively.


Thus, I think I agree with you that:
>As I said above, the "everything's a function" (i.e., lambda calculus)
>concept, when applied to designing (artificial) languages, can result in
>no distinctions between nouns and verbs being needed.

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.

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.

As for your request for information:  I sent to you several files,
including our electronic form of the brochure, a minilesson, an article
on Lojban's applications in lingustics, a 6-part grammar summary, an
order form for our materials, and a description of how to use the
Planned Languages Server to get many of those materials via email,
although the formatting is often not screen-friendly or garbled in
electronic versions.  If you got the order form, then you should know
the prices that we charge on international orders.  We can accept
cheques or Master Card/Visa credit card orders, but we pass the fees we
pay for these services on to you.  If the costs are too high for you,
you can ask for help and state your intentions regarding learning/using
the language in your work and we may be able to send you materials at a
reduced cost or for free.

Since we are interested in spreading Lojban around the linguistics
community and overseas (the latter reducing English speaker biases
during these formative years of the language), we try to accomodate
people who need help, but our resources are pretty sparse.

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.
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.

That you posted material that reveals an interest and insight into
aspects of language that match those we are working on means that we
should be able to find some further common ground.

Thank you for your inquiry, and I look forward to your response.

lojbab