There are 10 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1.1. Re: Reading and Writing
From: BPJ
1.2. Re: Reading and Writing
From: David McCann
1.3. Re: Reading and Writing
From: Nikolay Ivankov
1.4. Re: Reading and Writing
From: Padraic Brown
1.5. Re: Reading and Writing
From: BPJ
2.1. Re: Conlangs as Academic Evidence in Linguistic Studies: How Serious
From: Logan Kearsley
2.2. Re: Conlangs as Academic Evidence in Linguistic Studies: How Serious
From: Logan Kearsley
2.3. Re: Conlangs as Academic Evidence in Linguistic Studies: How Serious
From: And Rosta
2.4. Re: Conlangs as Academic Evidence in Linguistic Studies: How Serious
From: Logan Kearsley
3a. Re: Topic: preverbal/postverbal goodness
From: Patrick Dunn
Messages
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1.1. Re: Reading and Writing
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Tue May 3, 2011 7:05 am ((PDT))
2011-05-02 22:06, Jörg Rhiemeier skrev:
> Hallo!
>
> On Mon, 2 May 2011 15:46:46 -0400, Tony Harris wrote:
>
>> There are languages like Thai that still don't really use spaces between
>> words. I wonder how that does with silent reading?
>
> Certainly, spacing makes reading (and thus also silent reading)
> easier, but I don't see how spacing is *necessary* for silent
> reading. I doubt that the commuters in Bangkok's suburban trains
> read out their morning papers aloud!
>
> At any rate, I had no problem reading BPJ's example of scriptio
> continua silently. Slower than normal text, but still silently.
Sorry! Late hour understatement on my part. I rather
meant that spacing made it easier to read which gave
rise to the idea that silent reading was possible.
Probably there were silent readers (and writers) in the
Mediterranean world before Ambrose, but it was clearly
an uncommon skill. I also get the impression that the
cultural norm was that most literature was consumed in
the form of someone reading aloud not to themselves or
to a single person, but to a group of people, and that
most wealthy people had slave secretaries who took
dictation and read aloud to them, while the majority of
non-wealthy people were illiterate and paid for the
services of professionals to read and write letters for
them if need arose. The cultural milieu for silent
reading was simply lacking, and scriptio continua
certainly contributed in delaying its invention, while
spacing apparently gave the impetus to the invention.
Maybe the writing implements did too: I suspect that
it was a good deal harder to read early Roman cursive
letters scratched in wax fluently compared to more
formal letterforms written with ink on a smooth
surface. OTOH I strongly doubt that the scroll vs.
book form would be of any importance to anyone who
anyway read fluently enough to not need to trace
the line of writing with a finger or pointer. I
guess that that ability was confined to a small
minority too!
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CursivasRomanas.png>
I certainly didn't mean that it is impossible to read
scriptio continua silently.
BTW I have no idea how, when and where the idea of
silent reading arose anywhere other than in late
Graeco-Roman antiquity. Does anyone?
/bpj
Messages in this topic (30)
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1.2. Re: Reading and Writing
Posted by: "David McCann" da...@polymathy.plus.com
Date: Tue May 3, 2011 1:43 pm ((PDT))
On Tue, 3 May 2011 15:24:00 +0200
BPJ <b...@melroch.se> wrote:
> Probably there were silent readers (and writers) in the
> Mediterranean world before Ambrose, but it was clearly
> an uncommon skill. I also get the impression that the
> cultural norm was that most literature was consumed in
> the form of someone reading aloud not to themselves or
> to a single person, but to a group of people, and that
> most wealthy people had slave secretaries who took
> dictation and read aloud to them, while the majority of
> non-wealthy people were illiterate and paid for the
> services of professionals to read and write letters for
> them if need arose. The cultural milieu for silent
> reading was simply lacking, and scriptio continua
> certainly contributed in delaying its invention, while
> spacing apparently gave the impetus to the invention.
There's a chapter on silent reading in that wonderful book "A history
of reading" by Alberto Manguel. There are a number of references to
silent reading in Antiquity, going back to Aristophanes and Euripides,
but the practice seems to have become established in monastic
scriptoria. Reading aloud to a group continued in families so long as light in
the
evenings was restricted to expensive candles, and in places like inns
so long as there were illiterates who wanted to hear the news.
Scriptio continua was an increasing problem as the spoken and writen
languages diverged, and it was customary to markup texts with
punctuation, and guides to word boundaries when ambiguous. This had to
be done by the owner: published books were produced by a roomful of
slaves taking dictation, which was more rapidly done in scriptio
continua. Word spacing was an Irish invention, and placing the spaces
when transcribing texts lead to some lovely howlers, like "abas
secrevit" for "ab asse crevit"!
Messages in this topic (30)
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1.3. Re: Reading and Writing
Posted by: "Nikolay Ivankov" lukevil...@gmail.com
Date: Tue May 3, 2011 2:19 pm ((PDT))
On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 10:41 PM, David McCann <da...@polymathy.plus.com>wrote:
> On Tue, 3 May 2011 15:24:00 +0200
> BPJ <b...@melroch.se> wrote:
>
> > Probably there were silent readers (and writers) in the
> > Mediterranean world before Ambrose, but it was clearly
> > an uncommon skill. I also get the impression that the
> > cultural norm was that most literature was consumed in
> > the form of someone reading aloud not to themselves or
> > to a single person, but to a group of people, and that
> > most wealthy people had slave secretaries who took
> > dictation and read aloud to them, while the majority of
> > non-wealthy people were illiterate and paid for the
> > services of professionals to read and write letters for
> > them if need arose. The cultural milieu for silent
> > reading was simply lacking, and scriptio continua
> > certainly contributed in delaying its invention, while
> > spacing apparently gave the impetus to the invention.
>
> There's a chapter on silent reading in that wonderful book "A history
> of reading" by Alberto Manguel. There are a number of references to
> silent reading in Antiquity, going back to Aristophanes and Euripides,
> but the practice seems to have become established in monastic
> scriptoria. Reading aloud to a group continued in families so long as light
> in the
> evenings was restricted to expensive candles, and in places like inns
> so long as there were illiterates who wanted to hear the news.
>
> Scriptio continua was an increasing problem as the spoken and writen
> languages diverged, and it was customary to markup texts with
> punctuation, and guides to word boundaries when ambiguous. This had to
> be done by the owner: published books were produced by a roomful of
> slaves taking dictation, which was more rapidly done in scriptio
> continua. Word spacing was an Irish invention, and placing the spaces
> when transcribing texts lead to some lovely howlers, like "abas
> secrevit" for "ab asse crevit"!
>
Well, the problem with scripto continua may have been even more apparent in
the areas where the material for writing on it was expensive. AFAIK the
expensiveness of the pergament led to the introduction of some characters
that combined several letters (the introduction of cyrillic letter "Ñ" form
"Ñ" and "Ñ" written one above another is an example). The introduction of
"titlo" in OCS served the same purpose, and only later became a symbol of
sacrality (something like "богÑ" for a pagan god and «бгÒÑ» for the
God in
Christianity).
Messages in this topic (30)
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1.4. Re: Reading and Writing
Posted by: "Padraic Brown" elemti...@yahoo.com
Date: Tue May 3, 2011 3:12 pm ((PDT))
From: David McCann da...@polymathy.plus.com
>Reading aloud to a group continued in families so long as light in the
>evenings was restricted to expensive candles, and in places like inns
>so long as there were illiterates who wanted to hear the news.
And of course, the practice continues -- radio and television news are typically
read from a text; poetry readings; many religious traditions (such as the Xian
liturgy); "story time" in grammar school; etc.
Padraic
Messages in this topic (30)
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1.5. Re: Reading and Writing
Posted by: "BPJ" b...@melroch.se
Date: Wed May 4, 2011 4:15 am ((PDT))
> On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 10:41 PM, David
> McCann<da...@polymathy.plus.com>wrote:
>> There's a chapter on silent reading in that
>> wonderful book "A history of reading" by Alberto
>> Manguel.
Got to get my hands on that! :-)
>> There are a number of references to silent
>> reading in Antiquity, going back to Aristophanes and
>> Euripides, but the practice seems to have become
>> established in monastic scriptoria.
The classic account of course is Augusine's description
of his reaction to Ambrose reading silently: a bit of
alarm and disbelief, apparenly, dissolved only by the
obvious holiness of the man.
>> Reading aloud to a group continued in families so
>> long as light in the evenings was restricted to
>> expensive candles, and in places like inns so long
>> as there were illiterates who wanted to hear the
>> news.
Certainly. There is a nationalistic Icelandic painting
of an elderly man reading by a candle to the household
gathered around him, and I've seen 17th century
depictions of public reading of newspapers in inns.
>> Scriptio continua was an increasing problem as the
>> spoken and writen languages diverged, and it was
>> customary to markup texts with punctuation, and
>> guides to word boundaries when ambiguous.
Sure. After sending my previous post I noticed this
example of early Roman cursive which has interpuncts
between the word:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:I_littera_in_manuscripto.jpg>
(Probably the ugliest script that ever existed, BTW! :-)
>> This had to be done by the owner: published books
>> were produced by a roomful of slaves taking
>> dictation, which was more rapidly done in scriptio
>> continua.
Exactly. I also suspect that many of these slave
scribes simply weren't proficient enough in classical
Latin/Greek morphology to always be sure where the word
boundaries fell! Anyway it's a good illustration of
the fact that there are no pauses between words in
speech even at rather slow speeds (although there may
be other phonological manifestations of boundaries).
>> Word spacing was an Irish invention,
I wonder if this was exclusively so. Cursive scripts of
the Near East like Pahlavi, Syriac and Arabic would
have given rise to word spacing rather spontaneously, as
each word, or at least stress group, would consist of
connected letters and word boundaries be marked by pen
lifts. The role of the wax tablet in the development
of non-interconnected Latin letters should not be
underestimated!
BTW (linguistically) Old Irish MSS have spaces only
between stress groups, clitics being written connected
to their head -- even proclitics. Our present habit of
writing preverbs continuously probably owes its origin
to similar habits in medieval times. Prenominals aren't
any more stressed than preverbs are; the only real
difference I can perceive was that an adjective could
go between a preposition and a noun, while nothing
similar happened with preverbs. Another example is the
postposed article of North Germanic: it is written
connected although it is still a clitic rather than
a bound morph, at least in Icelandic and Faroese.
>> and placing the spaces when transcribing texts lead
>> to some lovely howlers, like "abas secrevit" for "ab
>> asse crevit"!
Is that really a genuine example? :-)
2011-05-03 23:13, Nikolay Ivankov skrev:
> Well, the problem with scripto continua may have been
> even more apparent in the areas where the material
> for writing on it was expensive. AFAIK the
> expensiveness of the pergament led to the
> introduction of some characters that combined several
> letters (the introduction of cyrillic letter "Ñ" form
> "Ñ" and "Ñ" written one above another is an example).
According to one hypothesis Щ was originally meant to
be the voiceless counterpart of Ð, i.e. /tÉ/ or /tsʲ/
as the reflex of *tj while/where that was distinct from
both /ts/ as the reflex of the second and third
palatalizations and /tÊ/ as the reflex of the first
palatalization. This is all the more likely as Ð as
used in the OCS MSS is an essentially syperfluous
letter, used corresponding to [gʲ] in Greek loans,
while no similar device (e.g. something like the modern
para-Cyrillic Ó! :-) is found for Greek [kʲ]. The later
uses of Щ as a ligature and Рas a xenophone would then
only have arisen after /tÉ/ and /dÊ/ merged with /ts/
and /dz/. NB that the Glagolitic version of Щ *is*
derived from Ш but doesn't look anything like a ШТ
ligature; the same goes for the Glagolitic Ð which
wasn't obviously derived from Glagolitic Ð or Ð either.
If Glagolitic Щ had been an ШТ ligature it would have
had two bowls under the Ш rather than one ring!
Here is a comparison for those who have font coverage
(the order being Glagolitic, Cyrillic, IPA for each):
ⰠЩ /tÉ/ ⰠШ /Ê/ ⰠТ /t/ â° Ð /dÊ/ â° Ð /g/ â° Ð /d/
> The introduction of "titlo" in OCS served the same
> purpose, and only later became a symbol of sacrality
> (something like "богÑ" for a pagan god and «бгÒÑ» for
> the God in Christianity).
>
The practice was only adopted from Greek usage, and
found its way also into the Latin world (the very word
_titulus_ is Latin, BTW!) E.g. _Iesus_ was written
_ihs_, with an abbreviation only one third
transliterated from Greek uncial ÎÎ(ΣÎÎ¥)Σ.
Old Icelandic MSS bristle with abbreviations and notae
in sacred and profane words alike; e.g. _hús_ 'house'
is routinely written _h9_ (or _hê°_ in proper Unicode)
with the nota for the Latin _-us_ ending! Parchment was
*very* scarce and expensive up there. Apparently they
preferred goat skin for parchment, sheep fur being in
more urgent demand for clothing. Still quite a few
sheep ended up as books, since they were in more
abundant supply. There are also examples of trying to
use seal skin for parchment, althoug the result seems
to have been of inferior quality. BTW a Pagan god was
always spelled _goð_ while the Christian God was
spelled _guð_, turning an originally dialectal
variation into a semantic. OTOH _guð_ retained its
neuter morphology although it took on masculine
agreement.
/bpj
Messages in this topic (30)
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2.1. Re: Conlangs as Academic Evidence in Linguistic Studies: How Serious
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" chronosur...@gmail.com
Date: Tue May 3, 2011 11:18 am ((PDT))
On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 8:03 PM, And Rosta <and.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
>> I don't understand why. It seems to me that all of the arguments
>> against Lojban apply equally to Fith.
>
> The rules of Fith grammar serve to take phonological words as input and
> yield predicate-argument structure as output. By contrast, Lojban's grammar
> assigns meaningless baroque structures to sequences of phonological words:
> the baroque structures are unlike anything found in natlangs, and they have
> no relationship to meaning; the so-called grammar is not really linguistic
> at all.
Ah. I understand the objection now.
>> But the reasons are entirely different- simple lack of skill with a
>> particular language vs. lack of the neurological machinery required to
>> develop that skill.
>
> No, I meant that Fithians would be much better than humans at speaking not
> only Fith but also natlangs, because of their superior neurological
> machinery. My general point being that the essential differences are in the
> memory capacities of the two species, not in the grammars of their
> languages.
Perhaps. I suspect that Fithians would have trouble with a lot of
aspects of human natlangs that we don't worry about much, though. It's
not just a matter of different memory capacity, it's a matter of
different underlying models of processing and data representation.
>> Yes. Not without additional rules to allow for re-ordering to take
>> advantage of optimization techniques, and additional rules introducing
>> additional levels of abstraction (I'm pretty sure this is why all
>> natlangs that I know of, although they vary somewhat in syntactic
>> classes, all have more than 2 of them). The same concepts could be
>> broken up into multiple simple sentences with shallow trees, but
>> sentences with analogous structure require far more tree complexity in
>> Palno than in English.
>
> What are "levels of abstraction" and "analogous structure"?
No abstraction: All you have are generic "concepts". Some of them are
complete on their own, others have "holes" in their definitions that
can be filled in by other concepts. The structure in which you link
concepts together by using some concepts to fill in holes in others
defines larger compound concepts. When there are no unfilled holes,
you have a sentence.
One level up: Some concepts are atomic, and some are predicates.
Predicates are concepts for relations between other concepts, and
usually have holes to fill (argument structures).
Another level: Some full-shell concepts are suitable as sentences
(clauses), and others are only suitable as arguments to other concepts
(phrases).
Another level: There're different kinds of predicates that make
different kinds of phrases or clauses, which can only be joined into
larger concepts in specific ways depending on what their type is
(moving semantic distinctions in function into grammatical
distinctions).
More different kinds of predicates (verbs, adpositions, adjectives,
adverbs) and more different kinds of clauses and phrases represent
higher and higher levels of abstraction, because I can rely on an
abstract class definition rather than the semantics of a particular
morpheme to determine function and predict structure.
Etc., etc. Of course, this is only a partial ordering, and I'm sure
there are lots of other ways of defining the basic levels of
abstraction besides the one I just chose to outline.
I'm using "analogous structure" to mean roughly structures in one
language that will replicate as closely as possible the same parse
trees as structures in another language.
> Could you give an example of a Palno sentence that requires a much deeper
> parsing stack than its English equivalent?
"More different kinds of clauses represent higher levels of abstraction."
Transformed into Palno-with-conjunctions grammar (two, variants
depending on how I handle the attributives):
"Kinds-nom.-top. different-nom., more-nom., and clauses-acc. of-nom.
levels-nom-top. higher-nom. and abstraction-acc. of-acc. represent."
"Kinds-nom., which-nom. different, more and clauses-acc. of,
levels-acc., which-nom. higher and abstraction-acc. of, represent."
This isn't bad (after all, it's including the modifications I made to
make it not too bad- they flatten out the parse tree). But in the
original two-syntactic-class variant:
"(((Kinds-top. different) more) clauses of) ((levels-top. higher)
abstraction of) represent."
Parenthesized to make the nesting levels obvious. This is a short
sentence, so it's not getting unwieldy yet, but you can start to see,
every additional adjective, preposition, or adverb in English adds an
extra nesting level to the strict-Palno equivalent. (Relative clauses
somewhat surprisingly don't add an extra level, because the Palno
versions just re-arrange the nesting order; conjunctions don't add any
extra X-bar levels, but they do require more memory capacity.) The
sullied-Palno versions have a lot more grammatical marking, but the
parse trees end up a lot flatter, pretty darn close to English
equivalents.
Note that I'm using topic marking as an equivalent for relational
operators or variable declaration without having to actually extract
multiple independent sentences. Without the topic marking, this:
"(((Kinds different) more) clauses of) ((levels higher) abstraction
of) represent."
means something like
"The fact that there are more instances of kinds being different
represents the fact that instances of levels being higher are of
abstraction."
Which is really confusing in English, and really easy to say in Palno,
but then, that's not the sort of thing one would want to say very
often, and I don't consider a strength that a language is really good
at tersely encoding things that you would never want to say, and less
good at things that you would like to say.
-l.
Messages in this topic (79)
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2.2. Re: Conlangs as Academic Evidence in Linguistic Studies: How Serious
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" chronosur...@gmail.com
Date: Tue May 3, 2011 1:40 pm ((PDT))
> Could you give an example of a Palno sentence that requires a much deeper
> parsing stack than its English equivalent?
I think I've got a better example:
"The little boy kicked the ball over the fence and into the neighbor's yard."
"((((Boy-top. little) ball kicked)-top. fence over) (yard-top.
neighbor of) into)."
That's a pretty simple sentence in English, but Palno requires going
four levels deep just to get to what's the subject in English. And if
you don't allow the cheat of topic extraction, it gets much worse:
"((Boy little) ((((he ball kicked) fence over) (that yard into) and)
(yard neighbor of) and) and)."
Note, I'm including the parentheses just to make it obvious.
Parentheses are not required to parse it, but I can't do so in
anything like real-time.So, the very simplest grammatical forms result
in the most difficult to understand structure. Adding topic extraction
makes things easier, but still iffy. Adding infix conjunctions and
flexible argument order gets it to a level where it might actually be
usable. And that's before we even consider things like mood and tense
marking, though those are nicely susceptible to tail optimization.
-l.
Messages in this topic (79)
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2.3. Re: Conlangs as Academic Evidence in Linguistic Studies: How Serious
Posted by: "And Rosta" and.ro...@gmail.com
Date: Tue May 3, 2011 4:37 pm ((PDT))
Logan Kearsley, On 03/05/2011 21:35:
>> Could you give an example of a Palno sentence that requires a much deeper
>> parsing stack than its English equivalent?
>
> I think I've got a better example:
Thanks for your patience in trying to explain. Bear with me while I still try
to understand.
> "The little boy kicked the ball over the fence and into the neighbor's yard."
> "((((Boy-top. little) ball kicked)-top. fence over) (yard-top.
> neighbor of) into)."
>
> That's a pretty simple sentence in English, but Palno requires going
> four levels deep just to get to what's the subject in English.
The Palno seems to require a stack 3 deep:
1 item: boy
1 item: boy-little
2 items: boy-little, ball
1 item: boy-little-ball-kicked
2 items: boy-little-ball-kicked fence
1 item: boy-little-ball-kicked-fence-over
2 items: boy-little-ball-kicked-fence-over, yard
3 items: boy-little-ball-kicked-fence-over, yard, neighbour
2 items: boy-little-ball-kicked-fence-over, yard-neighbour-of
1 item: boy-little-ball-kicked-fence-over-yard-neighbour-of-into
... and so does the English (following the Palno in ignoring "the" and "and"
and treating the adverbials as sentence modifiers):
1 item: little
1 item: little-boy
2 items: little-boy, kicked
1 item: little-boy-kicked-ball
2 items: little-boy-kicked-ball, over
1 item: little-boy-kicked-ball-over-fence
2 items: little-boy-kicked-ball-over-fence, into
3 items: little-boy-kicked-ball-over-fence, into, neighbour
3 items: little-boy-kicked-ball-over-fence, into, neighbour-'s
1 item: little-boy-kicked-ball-over-fence-into-neighbour-'s-yard
>And if
> you don't allow the cheat of topic extraction, it gets much worse:
>
> "((Boy little) ((((he ball kicked) fence over) (that yard into) and)
> (yard neighbor of) and) and)."
I don't understand how this means what it means. But at any rate, I get a max
stack depth of 4:
1: boy
1: boy-little
2: boy-little, he
3: boy-little, he, ball
2: boy-little, he-ball-kicked
3: boy-little, he-ball-kicked, fence
2: boy-little, he-ball-kicked-fence-over
3: boy-little, he-ball-kicked-fence-over, that
4: boy-little, he-ball-kicked-fence-over, that, yard
3: boy-little, he-ball-kicked-fence-over, that-yard-into
2: boy-little, he-ball-kicked-fence-over-that-yard-into-and
3: boy-little, he-ball-kicked-fence-over-that-yard-into-and, yard
4: boy-little, he-ball-kicked-fence-over-that-yard-into-and, yard, neighbour
3: boy-little, he-ball-kicked-fence-over-that-yard-into-and, yard-neighbour-of
2: boy-little,
he-ball-kicked-fence-over-that-yard-into-and-yard-neighbour-of-and
1:
boy-little-he-ball-kicked-fence-over-that-yard-into-and-yard-neighbour-of-and-and
Is it really the case that this is very complicated?
--And.
Messages in this topic (79)
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2.4. Re: Conlangs as Academic Evidence in Linguistic Studies: How Serious
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" chronosur...@gmail.com
Date: Tue May 3, 2011 7:43 pm ((PDT))
On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 5:32 PM, And Rosta <and.ro...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Logan Kearsley, On 03/05/2011 21:35:
>>>
>>> Could you give an example of a Palno sentence that requires a much deeper
>>> parsing stack than its English equivalent?
>>
>> I think I've got a better example:
>
> Thanks for your patience in trying to explain. Bear with me while I still
> try to understand.
>
>> "The little boy kicked the ball over the fence and into the neighbor's
>> yard."
>> "((((Boy-top. little) ball kicked)-top. fence over) (yard-top.
>> neighbor of) into)."
>>
>> That's a pretty simple sentence in English, but Palno requires going
>> four levels deep just to get to what's the subject in English.
>
> The Palno seems to require a stack 3 deep:
If you're actually using a stack-based computer to parse it, perhaps.
But my brain doesn't use stacks like a Fithian's, it uses trees, and I
cannot deserialize that in anything like real-time.
> ... and so does the English (following the Palno in ignoring "the" and "and"
> and treating the adverbials as sentence modifiers):
But the English version produces a flatter tree, with more branches
coming off of each node and more types of nodes for mnemonic value.
>> "((Boy little) ((((he ball kicked) fence over) (that yard into) and)
>> (yard neighbor of) and) and)."
>
> I don't understand how this means what it means. But at any rate, I get a
> max stack depth of 4:
Trying to back-translate the structure into English looks something
like this: "There's a boy who's little. He kicked a ball over a fence.
That action was into a yard. The yard is the neighbor's."
It gets more and more mangled every time you go back and forth. If I
then take this multi-sentence English version and put it back into
Palno, all of the Palno sentences are extremely simple and easy to
understand. But that's just what I was saying to begin with: the
easiest way to make original two-syntactic-class Palno understandable
is to just break down everything you want to say into the smallest
possible logical chunks, resulting in extremely verbose discourse with
tons of tiny sentences; but then, as I explain below, you risk losing
track of how many possible sentences you have to keep in mind just in
case they turn out to be subordinate clauses later on.
> Is it really the case that this is very complicated?
Can *you* understand sequences of sentence-terminal divalent
predicates? Monovalents aren't a problem because of tail optimization,
but I have major problems with sequences of multivalent predicates,
even when they're not repetitious. With topic extraction, I can
scrunch this example down to only two sequential predicates at the
end, but get rid of that and I can't do better than three, with a
doubled "and", which is terribly confusing; if you have some kind of
grammatical distinction between a phrase and a clause (which is what
topic extraction is doing) that helps, but otherwise the minimal
grammar may only *require* a four-deep stack to parse, but you can't
know that ahead of time; there's no way to tell how much you may have
to remember in case it gets used later.
-l.
Messages in this topic (79)
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3a. Re: Topic: preverbal/postverbal goodness
Posted by: "Patrick Dunn" pwd...@gmail.com
Date: Tue May 3, 2011 12:31 pm ((PDT))
Neat. Does the possessive not trigger a presupposition of existence in
Turkish?
On Tue, May 3, 2011 at 2:29 AM, Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 03:59, A. Mendes <andrewtmen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > So Korean and Japanese with case markings, and Hebrew and Russian with
> > prepositions/(and/or case?). Mean!
>
> And Turkish does something like "My car exists" for "I have a car",
> and "Does your car exist?" for "Do you have a car?".
>
> Cheers,
> Philip
> --
> Philip Newton <philip.new...@gmail.com>
>
--
I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to
window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance. --Arthur Rimbaud
Messages in this topic (19)
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