Re: ill-formed

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

Jorge says:

> That sounds right. I think what I was trying to say has nothing much to
> do with logic, in fact.
>
> I don't know if *well-formed* is the best way to put it, but this is what
> I meant:
>
> The lojban sentence {mi cusku li mu} is grammatical, but fails in the
> category matching. It doesn't mean "I say 'five'". That would be
> {mi cusku zo mu}. As far as I understand, it is a meaningless sentence,
> although grammatical, so to say that it is true or false is also
> meaningless. I don't know if we could say that it's *ill-formed*, but
> there's definitely something wrong with it.

I entirely agree.

I think there is a hierarchy of levels of well-formedness in Lojban (probably
in any language) and it would be worth trying to clarify them.

Here is a first attempt:

1. Ungrammatical - fails to parse at all
eg
        *cu noi .e xamgu
        *mi viska le gerku jo'u le mlatu

(Impressionistically, there is a further distinction, between completely
uninterpretable strings like the first, and nearly-valid utterances like
the second, but I doubt whether the distinction can be made objective enough
to be useful).

2. Parses, but fails to be meaningful because undefined terbri are invoked
eg
        *mi gleki do le mlatu

3. Parses, but fails category consistency (including illicit raising)
eg
        mi cusku li mu
        do rinka zo gleki

4. Parses and meets consistency requirements but is semantically or
pragmatically meaningless or self-contradictory
        ko'a balvi le balvi be ko'a
        lo skacau ke crino sidbo cu vilfenki sipna

Colin Fine