WikiDiscuss

pc:
> Ah, the LoCCan use of words!. "Reduced" here
> applies, I suppose, the dropping the "logically
> irrelevant" bits;

Right, and also reducing the various ways of doing
the same thing (as in afterthought vs. forethoght).

> for the most part sentences are
> expanded to get these forms (prenexing requires
> anaphora, forethought connectives are regularly
> longer than afterthought and shifting to
> sentential requires repetitions).

Yes, definitely. It's reduced in complexity,
but usually expanded in size.

> Terminology
> aside, however, this seems a useful thing to do
> for a logical language, moving toward (or away
> from, since this is likely a deeper structure
> grammar than the usual one — or so a logically
> corrupted linguist would say) the form suited for
> usual logical applications. The contention is the
> usual (ultimately unsupported — in natural
> languages) assumption of applied formalized
> logics.

In the case of Lojban the contention is much less
contentious, given that it is almost purely a formal matter.
I am not claiming that two sentences with the same reduced
form will have the same meaning. All I say is that they
have the same propositional content, but the meaning
usually involves more than that. This is clear, as
for example {ju'a do klama le zarci}, {xu do klama le zarci}
and {e'u do klama le zarci} all have the same reduced form
(i.e. propositional content) but obviously different meaning
in a wider sense.

> For the real deep logical sturcture, it would be
> good to get the modals etc. out to the front as
> well.

If the modals are {ka'e} and company, they are already

there: that's what provides.

> This is somewhat problematic, since the
> modals (including tense/aspect and mood)is not
> grammatically, but only lexically, specifiable.

They are specified in the same way as negation:
{na ku}, {pu ku}, {ka'e ku}, etc.

> And there may be cases where this brings to light
> ambiguities — in the speaker's intentions,
> though maybe not in the Lojban text (details of
> the relative placement of tense, mode, negation
> and quantification which cannot be dealt with in
> the narrow confines of the preselbri slot).

I haven't fully considered this yet. Do you have any
examples in mind?

> The
> use of forethought connectives is tidy though not
> essential, as is the shift to VSO order.

With forethought connecives we can get rid of all
the bracketing stuff, much tidier. VSO order I just
included to settle on a single form as the reduced form.

> The purpose of this exercise is to
> > clarify the argument for the scope of NA. In
> > the reduced logical form the relative scopes of
> > the different operators are fairly obvious.
>
> The relative scope in each case is just
> everything after it in the same sentence (which
> is also rather better defined in this
> representation).

Exactly.

> Is this all about the issue — which has been
> around since the beginning of Loglan — of where
> sentential negation goes? It is clear, of
> course, in prenex form — though in the shift to
> forethought connectives some problems could
> reappear if {nagi} is allows from {na.a} etc.
> (e.g. "only if" for conditionals).

{na.a} expands to {ganai ... gi ...}.

{nagi} is not grammatical.

{na ga ... gi ...} is equivalent to {genai ... ginai ....}
which is also {ge naku zo'u .... gi naku zo'u ...}.

> I suppose
> that, if we shifted everything to "reduced" form,
> some rules would be clearer but that does not
> solve the issue of where negation goes in
> colloquial usage — the issue that has come up
> over and over.

Yes. But seeing what the shift rules are in full
(or as much in full as we can manage) will hopefully
make it easier to decide which rule we should to adopt.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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