Re: Soaloa - A goofy little grammar/syntax

Hi!

Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> writes:
>...
> Longer sentence are formed in the same way with all
> sentences being of the form: SOA(L)(S)OA...(L)(S)OA,
> with the group "(L)(S)OA" being repeated an arbiraty
> number of times. (L) indicates that L may or may not
> be present and (S) indicates that S may or may not be
> present.
>
> In spite of its simplicity I am inclined to make the
> rash and unproven assertion that it is complete enough
> a grammar that any sentence in any natural language
> can be accurately translated into a single sentence in
> Soaloa.
>...
Hmm, if you consider natlangs to support potentially arbitrarily deep
tree-type syntax structures, then this is not enough, since embedded
clauses are missing.  To construct a sentence of this type, you'd need
a pattern of AB or BA, were A is a matrix clause and B is an auxilary
clause (or more generally: A is the modified and B is the modifier),
and then repeatedly construct more complex sentences by replacing A
and B by another layer of A'B' each.

1)  Mary reads a book
    .... ............
    A    B

    Structure: (AB)

2)  Mary, who is my wife, reads a book that is good.
    A     B               A            B
    ....................  ..........................
    A                     B

    Structure: ((AB)(AB))

3)  Mary, who is 40 years of age and who is my wife which means I am her husband,
    A     B                          A              B
    .............................    ...........................................
    A                                B
    ............................................................................
    A


    reads a book about cooking that is good, which means she liked it.
    A            B             A             B
    .........................  .......................................
    A                          B
    ..................................................................
    B

    Structure: (((AB)(AB))((AB)(AB)))

Humans cannot parse this arbitrarily deep, of cause, because the brain
cannot follow.  So if you have enough different Ls for each layer,
your grammar can work.  Still, this is really a performance problem,
not a general structural problem, and, therefore, you'd theoretically
need infinitely many Ls for the potentially arbitrarily deep
sentences.

However, I am not sure whether all languages really support this
arbitrary embedding, since, as I said, the brain's performance is
limited, so it would not surprise me if this limitation has
materialised in some language's grammar.

**Henrik

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