Re: Word classification (was ...)

Jörg Rhiemeier, On 14/07/2008 17:09:
> On Sat, 12 Jul 2008 10:46:42 +0100, And Rosta wrote:
>> Jim Henry, On 09/07/2008 03:12:
>> [...]
>>> Do you mean distributional categories -- sets of words that are
>>> liable to occur in the same context as each other?
>> After I sent that message I realized that what I was describing
>> is probably applicabe far more to predicate-based languages like
>> Lojban or Livagian than to more naturalistic ones.
>
> Yes; especially considering that in natlangs and naturalistic
> conlangs, the same verb may often be used with differently many
> arguments (as for passive, antipassive, causative, etc.), or
> with different cases assigned to the arguments.  In a loglang,
> it is advisable to eliminate such fluidities, or have "missing"
> arguments explicitly encoded as "dummy arguments" or whatever.
I think this is not the case. A loglang has no especial need to avoid
diathetical variation such as passive or ellipsis; it would merely want to
avoid unmarked operations that change truth-conditional meaning. It's true that
neither Lojban nor Livagian have conventional voices, but Lojban has lots of
fluidifying devices, and Livagian allows any argument to be implicit and does
not constrain the order of explicit arguments. There is no incompatibility
between fluidity and loglanghood.

>>      In Livagian there is just one part of speech.
>
> In a predicate-based language, there is no syntactic distinction
> between nouns, adjectives and verbs, yes; however, you will have
> a small closed class of elements such as junctors and quantors.
I won't; not in Livagian. What you call 'junctors and quantors' are predicates
too. There is a certain amount of syntactic glue expressed inflectionally, but
even that is not ineluctably necessary.

[...]
> And your example "X drinks milk Y produced by lactator Z" are
> *three* clauses, not one:
>
> drink(X,Y); milk(Y); produce(Z,Y)
>
> or maybe two if one rolls up the latter two in "lactate(Z,Y)".
That depends on the language, doesn't it. My language might have one predicate that
expresses what in your language it takes three predicates to express...

--And.