Re: Word classification (was ...)

Hallo!

On Mon, 14 Jul 2008 21:28:53 +0100, And Rosta wrote:

> 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.
True.  Of course, if not all argument slots are filled, one
must use some kind of marking to indicate which slots are
filled with which arguments.  Dummy arguments are one way;
case markers are another; verbal voice inflections yet
another.

> >>      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.
Yes; they are a sort of higher order predicates that take
predicates as arguments; or did I misunderstand something?
I know absolutely nothing about Livagian because I haven't
seen it yet.  You keep mentioning it all the time but never
show it.

>        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...
Sure; you can always add a predicate symbol to a language which
unitarily expresses a notion one could break up into several
clauses with simpler predicates.

I should perhaps shut up; loglangs are simply not my kettle of
fish, and I don't understand them well even though I once drafted
one ( http://wiki.frath.net/X-1 ) - it tells a lot that it never
went anywhere.  I am much more interested in exploring the
(naturalistic) Albic family.

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