Taaluketti

This page is in a very early stage of development.

Taaluketti is like Gaaziketti in many respects.

Parsing markers and modification

Every word-token (i.e. individual occurrence of a word in a sentence) will take one of four parsing markers:

(null) gather one, modify next

-s gather one, do not modify next

-n gather two, modify next

-k gather two, do not modify next

Parsing markers are not treated as words – they are “spoken punctuation”. All other morphemes are treated as words except those which are sub-elements of a compound-word. (Compound words are treated as words. Compounds words are strings of morphemes which morphemes, if they were words, would be words of type [Pc] – see below.)

Parsing markers clarify the structure of modification relations within a sentence. Modification is a relationship between one individual word-token, and another.

Each word-token is modified by some number (possibly zero) of other word-tokens. No word-token modifies more than one word-token. No word-token modifies a word-token in another sentence. No word-token modifies itself. No word-token modifies a word-token to its left.

Phrases and classes of phrases

Modification is a relation between word-tokens. But what about higher phrasal etc. syntactic relations? Well, suppose you’ve got a chain of word-tokens each (except the first) being modified just by its predecessor? Well, you assume a “((wx)y)z” type of phrasal pattern. Always. This is because each word is in fact a functor, and the words that modify it are the heads of the phrases which are its arguments. Functors always pick up arguments from their left (the opposite of standard mathematical notation).

A functor together with its arguments forms a phrase. The functor is the head of the phrase. When a functor modifies some other functor, this means that the phrase of which that functor is the head is an argument of that other functor.

Words and phrases may may divided into types. We begin with the type [Ap], or adverbial phrase, and the type [S], or statement. The notation “[x…x>y]” means that a certain word is a functor which takes any number of arguments of class x and, together with these arguments, constitutes a phrase of class y. The class of such a functor, that is, is [x…x>y].

Words of the class [Pc] =df [Ap…Ap>S] are called “predicate-cores”. A predicate-core is kind of like a predicate in Loglan, except it doesn’t have an order-based place-structure. Syntactically speaking, a predicate-core can take any number of arguments (including 0). Each of its arguments will be an adverbial phrase [Ap].

There are two kinds of adverbial phrase [Ap]. There are nominative adverbial phrases, which are just noun-phrases [Np]. And there are complex adverbial phrases, which consist of a noun-phrase followed by a postposition. Postpositions are functors which take a single argument of class [Np] and form a phrase of class [Ap], i.e. postpositions are of class [Np>Ap]. In summary: any noun-phrase is an adverbial phrase. And any phrase consisting of a single noun-phrase modifying a postposition is an adverbial phrase.

To make noun-phrases [Np], you’ve got a bunch of what I will call noun-heads [Nh]. The commonest noun-head is le, meaning – roughly – ‘the’. A phrase of the form ‘Y le’ (‘Y’ being some phrase that is an argument of ‘le’) is a noun-phrase [Np], meaning ‘the (single) person/object x such that ‘x Y’ would be a true sentence’, i.e. ‘the x which satisfies ‘Y’ ’. If many Ys each modify le, then le denotes the x that satisfies all of those Ys.