Veijo's 1994 proposal for nested relative clauses

I have finally gotten around to evaluating it, and as proposed it
causes shift/reduce errors.  However, I suspect that it is either not
necessary or not sufficient, because it conflates center-embedding with preposed
relative clauses.

To review, Veijo looked at the sumti:

1)	le (poi le (poi le tcadu cu se klama ku'o) nanmu cu se viska ku'o) verba
	the (into-the-town-going man)-seeing-child

and complained that the center-embedding was excessive, compared with the
Finnish equivalent.  The problem is that Lojban has articles which are
always on the left, whereas Finnish has no articles at all.  He then
proposed a linearized version using a special marker:

2)	le poi le tcadu cu se klama xu'o nanmu cu se viska ku'o verba

wherein the two relative clauses are separated by "xu'o" rather than
"ku'o", and the "le poi le poi" stutter at the beginning is removed.
All the clauses except the first would necessarily be of "poi" type.

Veijo then proposed a Yacc version which (unbeknownst to him) has S/R
errors.  I tried several more versions which also have errors, sometimes
even more errors.

However, I think there is a more fundamental issue.  Veijo claimed
that Examples 1 and 2 were equivalent to postposed relative clauses:

3)	le verba poi viska le nanmu poi klama le tcadu
	the child that sees the man that goes-into the town

As he correctly states, Example 3 is much easier to understand than
Example 1: there is no center-embedding, but just ordinary iteration.
However, Example 3 is >not< the result of postposing the relative
clauses in Example 1.  That gives:

4)	le verba poi le nanmu poi le tcadu cu se klama cu se viska
	the child that the man that the town is-gone-into-by is-seen-by

which is not quite as center-embedded as Example 1.  What happens if
we prepose the relative clauses of Example 3?  We get

5)	le poi viska le poi klama le tcadu ku'o le nanmu ku'o verba
	the seer-of the goer-to-the-store man child

which is also center-embedded.

"And what do we learn from this, comrades?"  I'm not sure, but at any
rate some further thinking is needed.  Please comment!

-- 
John Cowan					cowan@ccil.org
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban.