Re: linguolabials (was: Re: Hell hath no Fury)

Shreyas Sampat wrote:

> In either case, what a brilliantly useful idea!
> How miraculous!  A hollow verb!  (I'm being excitable.  Pardon.)

Lojban has a whole set of these pro-verbs.  You can plug in noun
phrases, tenses, etc. around them that override the corresponding
noun phrases in the referenced sentence, which can be:

        the immediately preceding sentence
        the sentence before that
        some earlier sentence (listener has to figure out which)
        some even earlier sentence (ditto)
        the next sentence (!)
        this very sentence (!!)

In my chunky monkey translation, I use one of these:

la            plana smani
the-one-named Fat   Monkey

pu   ponse   le        bakni
PAST possess a-certain bovine-animal

.ije na  ca   go'i
And  not PRES (previous sentence)

So the "na" and "ca" override the tense and negation conditions
of the previous sentence and then the "go'i" reiterates it.


> On pro-forms:
> What other pro-things are there?  Pronouns, of course, are all over the
> place.  IMO this is possible because a noun tends to be used repeatedly in
> a discourse, and so methods are devised to avoid that.  On the other hand,
> verbs are usually unrepeated for reasonable periods, and so when a proverb
> is used it's going to be either in a poetic context or such that the
> antecedent's been forgotten, or possibly in a me-too construction.
> When a pro-device is used, how does one find the antecedent?  Is it always
> the nearest convenient thing, perhaps at the same level of clause nesting,
> mm?
>
> ---
> Shreyas
>
>
>


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