Re: sumti categories

[Colin Fine <C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk>]

Jorge and I seem to be showing remarkable agreement about sumti categories now,
but there are still questions:

> I said:
>
> > One could imagine for example a classification whereby only certain terbri
> > could match a particular BAI - not that I think there really are any such
> > examples.
>
> I'm not sure I understand you. BAI normally modify (or complement) a whole
> bridi (or the selbri, depending how you look at it), not the terbri.

I was thinking of the sumti introduced by the BAI. I think I meant 'sumti'
rather than 'terbri' - I had in mind the common case when the seltcita sumti
is a selgadri, and therefore there is a relevant terbri picked out by the
gadri

Example:
cu'u requires roughly the same as cusku (+vol?)
secu'u requires the same as se cusku (+concept?)

John Cowan enters the discussion

> la kolin. cusku di'e
>
> > I agree with you about 'plant' - but I suspect that such categories will
> > be useful for machine checking and parsing - but not about Mass. I
> > believe that mass/set/individual is one of the fundamental grammatical
> > distinctions of Lojban, and is important even if it is comparatively
> > rarely specified for a terbri.
>
> I suspect that nothing is -mass, since any individual may be seen as a mass.
> Most things are %mass, and some are +mass (notably gunme, casnu).

You may be right; but even though the category will not then be useful
for co-occurrence restrictions, I think it will still be useful when/if we
are able to consider semantic analysis.
>
> > For example, I am quite unsure as to the features of 'banxa'. Consider the
> > feature +/- concrete.
>
> Like Jorge, I believe that "banxa" is -concrete, and that the bank branch
> is a "banxydinju".  This may be influenced because I work for, but not in,
> a bank, and in fact think of the bank branches as rather peripheral parts
> of the bank-entity.

John further comments on my question about na'i:

> la kolin. pu cusku di'e
>
> > > (What about na'ipei for the linguist's "?" (doubtful grammaticality)?
> > > I'm not happy about it - I suspect we need a question word on the
> > > jo'a/na'i dimension)
>
> la xorxes. cusku di'e
>
> > How about {na'icu'i}? (Or {jo'acu'i}, depending which side you favour.)
>
> Well, it depends on what you want.  "na'ipei" signals a question: To what
> degree is the following sentence pragmatically unacceptable?  "peina'i"
> signals a related but different question: Is the following sentence
> pragmatically unacceptable?
>
> "na'icu'i", OTOH, affirms that the sentence is midway on the scale between
> acceptable and unacceptable.  All these forms work equally well with "jo'a",
> of course; "jo'a" and "na'i" represent the same scale, and are given
> separate cmavo for reasons of compactness and avoidance of confusion
> ("na'inai" looks funny as an affirmation).

I find this very answer helpful and useful, except for a nagging feeling that
na'i/jo'a live at a different level from the other UI (including pei).

        Colin Fine