Logan Kearsley wrote:
>> This seems to have potential for ambiguity, if one's not fastidious about
>> the positions of the commas (and maybe even if one is, with a more
>> complicated example -- I haven't convinced myself either way). Consider a
>> sentence of form
>> a who a.ACC p a.ACC p a.ACC p
>> where each a is an atom, and each p a predicate taking nom and acc
>> arguments. Does the relative clause finish after the first p, or the second?
>
> Or after the third, leaving an incomplete sentence. You can't tell
> without the commas. They are absolutely required. It would be nice to
> have a way around that, but I haven't found one yet.
Latejami (and my own conlang which is heavily influenced by Latejami) have a
parse rule that the parser won't quit the current level until it encounters
something which violates the syntax for that level. So if you have an adverb
following an embedded verb then it will always be parsed as modifying the
embedded verb and not the main one. If you want it to modify the main verb
you have to use a particle which terminates the embedded verb.
Maybe something like this could work for you language?
> Keeping up the mathematical/computational analogy, my justification
> for this structure is that a comma + relative pronoun is like a
> function call that temporarily creates a new stack frame to parse the
> next bit of the sentence in, and the closing comma is like a return
> statement that restores the original stack frame, but with the top
> element altered.
Just a question: Is this language supposed to be written-only?
--
Veoler