What's the current situation with Chomsky's grammar for Lojban?

[Gleki Arxokuna]

Just short citation from  http://www.lojban.org/files/why-lojban/swh.txt

115. lojbab: (responding to 106.)  The claim I made is that John Parks-Clifford,

a linguist involved with Loglan	since 1975, told me that he investigated 1970's

Loglan using TG	techniques during the 70's and was able	to demonstrate to his

own satisfaction that all features of Loglan were amenable to TG analysis, and

that he	found no 'unusual' transforms.	More recently, a student in Cleveland

has been attempting to develop a more formal TG	description of the language.

This will undoubtedly take a while, but	he reported to me earlier this year that

not only had he	found nothing unusual, he had identified some elegant features

of the language	using TG techniques.  The features he reported are indeed con-

sistent	with the language definition, and included aspects that	the student had

not been taught	(i.e. that we had not put into any published documents that the

student	had received.

So where is that description by a student from Cleveland?

What's that unusual in Lojban grammar?

Have there been other attempts to describe our beloved badna bangu? 

[John E Clifford]

To answer the first and last questions, so far as I know, no study of Loglan or Lojban using a transformational grammar has ever appeared.  Nor, more aptly, a Montague grammar neither.  Both seem perfectly feasible to me, since there is, in fact, nothing very unusual about Logjam grammars overall (assuming we actually get things settled down).  Indeed, Logjam is, by design, pretty simple grammatically, even for a complex grammar-building system like Chomsky's or Montague's.  What is not clear is whether a formal grammar of either of these sorts could be built to correspond exactly to whatever grammar finally becomes official and whether such a grammar could be provably monoparsing.  I suspect that those issues -- involving especially restrictions on deletion rules -- have been a great delaying factor (they certainly have been for me).

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From: Gleki Arxokuna <gleki.is...@gmail.com>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, July 29, 2012 4:02 AM
Subject: [lojban] What's the current situation with Chomsky's grammar for Lojban?

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[Escape Landsome]

From a linguist's viewpoint, in today Linguistics, chomskyan grammars
are has-been.

They are supeseded by unification grammars.

And maybe, in some more years, cognitive grammars will render
unification grammars obsolete.

You still live in the 70's ?

[John E Clifford]

Despite your remark, Linguistics still seems to live pretty much in the '70s.  The details of theories have been worked through more thoroughly, the relative prominence of different approaches have shifted (without any being obliterated -- Social Science are hard to tell from Philosophy sometimes) and the mechanical implementation of techniques has vastly improved.  But there are still just item-and-process and item-and-arrangement vying with one another.  Unification grammar, despite its name, doesn't seem to be either holistic nor a blend of the two approaches, but rather an elaboration of the Chomskian theme.  (Note: I haven't delved into recent detail much, so this may be off base by some considerable degree.  But, if it is, the jargon has become terribly misleading.)

---

From: Escape Landsome <esca...@gmail.com>
To: loj...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, July 29, 2012 11:31 AM
Subject: Re: [lojban] What's the current situation with Chomsky's grammar for Lojban?

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[MorphemeAddict]

When I was in high school (early '70s), I became infatuated with TG, thanks to my German teacher (Thanks, Miss Meeker!), who introduced me to it. TG (especially phrase structure grammar) is still my basic model for grammar, and I haven't been able to get 'into' the newer approaches. 

stevo

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[Escape Landsome]

> Despite your remark, Linguistics still seems to live pretty much in the
> '70s. The details of theories have been worked through more thoroughly, the
> relative prominence of different approaches have shifted (without any being
> obliterated -- Social Science are hard to tell from Philosophy sometimes)
> and the mechanical implementation of techniques has vastly improved. But
> there are still just item-and-process and item-and-arrangement vying with
> one another.

There are still some theoretical linguist who cling to TG and also
old-fashioned folks who study for example old chinese or swahili,
these use TG because that's what they were taught when students, and
there is a lot of inertia in people minds.

But today searchers in the field of Language Automated Treatment, that
is : the guys who try to make computers speak, analyse texts, resume
texts, comment on texts, and simulate human or natlang dialogues...
all of these now currently use Unification Grammars.

UG are :

-- Bresnan's Lexical Functional Grammar LFG

-- HPSG

-- GPSG

-- and also Tree-Adjoining Grammar, TAG

These UG are as much chomskyan as Laplace physics are newtonian.
There is really an epistemologic cut between them.

[And Rosta]

Escape Landsome, On 30/07/2012 10:05:

>> Despite your remark, Linguistics still seems to live pretty much in the
>> '70s. The details of theories have been worked through more thoroughly, the
>> relative prominence of different approaches have shifted (without any being
>> obliterated -- Social Science are hard to tell from Philosophy sometimes)
>> and the mechanical implementation of techniques has vastly improved. But
>> there are still just item-and-process and item-and-arrangement vying with
>> one another.
>
> There are still some theoretical linguist who cling to TG and also
> old-fashioned folks who study for example old chinese or swahili,
> these use TG because that's what they were taught when students, and
> there is a lot of inertia in people minds.

This is not remotely an accurate picture of contemporary linguistics. No work in 70s-era TG is published nowadays. Much work in contemporary TG (Minimalism) is published.

It's of no relevance for Lojban, tho.

> But today searchers in the field of Language Automated Treatment, that
> is : the guys who try to make computers speak, analyse texts, resume
> texts, comment on texts, and simulate human or natlang dialogues...
> all of these now currently use Unification Grammars.
>
> UG are :
>
> -- Bresnan's Lexical Functional Grammar LFG
>
> -- HPSG
>
> -- GPSG
>
> -- and also Tree-Adjoining Grammar, TAG
>
> These UG are as much chomskyan as Laplace physics are newtonian.
> There is really an epistemologic cut between them.

From the perspective of a pure linguistician (such as me) rather than a computational linguist, Minimalism does not look vastly different from LFG & HPSG/GPSG. They're all phrase-structure grammars. They all purport to offer an overarching theory of the structure of language. I don't see any great epistemological divide.

--And.