Re: Telona on the web at last

Harald Stoiber wrote:
>>>
How do you handle verbs like "give". There would be
three entities: the giver, the givee (sort of *g)
and the gift. How would you do this? At the moment
I have troubles figuring out how you would incorporate
the direct object and how you could distinguish it
clearly from the indirect object.
<<<

An excellent question.  You're right, it is a weakness of Telona that
each 'verb' can only take one 'object'.  I haven't come up with a
general solution, but I can comment on the case you mention.

The word 'give' (I haven't actually translated it yet!) would refer to
the giver, and would probably take the gift as direct object (that is
to say, the phrase governed under + by 'give' would refer to the
gift).

Then, a word like 'towards' would take the 'givee' as object (or
perhaps better, 'recipient' <g>).  The word 'towards' could co-refer
with either the giver or the gift, depending on whether the giver or
the gift was seen as the source of the movement towards the recipient.

If all three people were named in the same utterance, the structure
could be something like this, taking 'Andrew (A) gave the box (B) to
Cathy (C)' as example:

(1)  A ((giver + B) (towards + C))

(2)  A (giver + (B (towards + C)))

In (1), 'towards' co-refers with 'giver', while in (2), it co-refers
with the gift.  It would be quite important to get the semantics of
the word 'towards' right, but it should be possible to make this work
elegantly.

>>>
How are passive nouns expressed (like the spoken
one, the beaten one, ...). Is there a generic word
meaning "somebody or something" which could then be
used like:
<somebody or something> - <one who speaks>
Is this the way you intended to solve such passive
noun constructions?
<<<

If a passive noun appears as a predicate, then the answer is easy: 'He
was the beaten one.' -> He - beat (using the - operator).  But I
suppose you meant: what if you put this the other way round, and said
'The one who got beaten was David.'  Again, a very good point -
there's no perfectly elegant way of doing this.  One has a choice
between:

1)  (DUMMY - beat) David.  (where DUMMY is some anaphor or proform)
2)  Beat + David.

(1) is more like what you suggested, but it would be difficult (though
not impossible, I think) to design a system where the choice of
proform was elegant and didn't look arbitrary.

(2) would be my favoured translation.  The phrase which constitutes
the sentence, (beat + David), refers to the person who beat David, but
the sentence puts 'beat' as the topic and 'David' as the comment,
which is right.

Something about this translation makes me feel a little uneasy, but I
can't quite decide what it is.  I don't like sentences in which the
top-level operator is + or -; I somehow feel the two halves of a
sentence should co-refer.  I have in the past wondered whether (2)-
type translations should be restricted to older or more formal
registers, while type (1) would be more colloquial.  What do you
think?

Thanks for the comments - very perceptive,
Jonathan.

[reply to jonathan underscore knibb at hotmail dot com]
--
'O dear white children casual as birds,
Playing among the ruined languages...'
Auden/Britten, 'Hymn to St. Cecilia'