Re: veridicality in grammar

[ucleaar <ucleaar@ucl.ac.uk>]

Bob:
> dmb@ironwood.cray.com said:
>        Since veridicality isn't usually a concern in English it's difficult to
>     construct an analog.  References to "deciduous pines", "colorless green
>     objects" or "sunsets in the eastern sky" would be possible examples of
>     syntactically valid phrases that lack meaning.  ...
> Right: all syntactically valid in *English*; none grammatically incorrect.
> But the definition of {lo} is:
>     the one(s) that really is(are)
> Lojban is truly different.  Applying {lo} to a sunset in the Eastern
> sky is *incorrect*, if you are talking of earth, and talking of the
> sun setting, rather than the fading of a distant atomic explosion, or
> the results of a peculiar cloud formation.
> The point is, {lo} and {le} are grammatical categories.  In natural
> languages, grammatical categories are used by people *effortlessly* or
> nearly so.  Semantic categories `take thought'; they require felt
> effort.
> My hunch is that speakers of Lojban will learn to make the distinction
> among sumti_tails distinguished by {le}, {loi}, {lo'e}, {le}, etc, as
> easily as we English speakers make distinctions among past,
> progressive present, future, and future perfect.
>
> But I may be wrong.  This is an issue that can eventually be settled
> empirically.

Your hunch, I think will prove right. But your notion of what is and
isn't grammatical is wrong. Maybe this is just a matter of terminology:
you posted the other day a definition of what you meant by "grammatical",
and this definition is in fact a definition of what is usually called
"acceptable". All the utterances you're calling ungrammatical certainly
are unacceptable: there's something odd, wrong, or inappropriate about
them. To test whether some sentence, S, is *grammatical*, you program a
machine with the rules of grammar and the wherewithal to construct
sentences on the basis of these rules: the machine churns out sentences,
and if S is among them (we assume you have an infinite amount of time
to perform this experiment) then S is grammatical.

Note that grammaticality has nothing to do with the context of an
utterance. If I say "I wept tomorrow", this is grammatical but
unacceptable. If I say "mi viska lo cipnrdodo" but I have never
seen a dodo, then this sentence is grammatical but false, and, if
"lo cipnrdodo" is referring to a cat, then it is unacceptable,
though still grammatical.

In this respect Lojban is not truly different.

---
And