Taaluketti

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Taaluketti is like Gaaziketti in many respects.

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

(null) "leftmost and only argument of its phrase"

-s "leftmost argument, but not only argument, of its phrase"

-n "final argument, but not only argument, of its phrase"

-k "neither the first argument, not the last argument, of its phrase"

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.

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 f together with its arguments forms a phrase, and f is said to be the head of that phrase.

When a functor modifies some other functor, this means that the phrase of which the modifying functor is the head is an argument of that other functor.

The use of parsing markers to show what modifies what is perhaps best explained as follows.

The structure of a phrase is like this: (x1, x2, ... xn)y.

Here y is the head of the phrase, and x1, x2, ..., xn are the n different arguments of y.

Suppose n=0. Then we have a phrase of this form: "y".

Suppose n=1. Then we have a phrase of this form: "x1 y".

Suppose n=2. Then we have a phrase of this form: "x1s x2n y".

Suppose n=3. Then we have a phrase of this form: "x1s x2k x3n y".

Suppose n=4. Then we have a phrase of this form: "x1s x2k x3k x4n y".

Suppose n=5. Then we have a phrase of this form: "x1s x2k x3k x4k x5n y".

Phrases (including word-tokens, which are themselves phrases) may be classified into types (also called classes). Two basic types are the type [Ap], or adverbial phrase, and the type [S], or statement.

The notation “[x…x>y]” means that an item of the type [x...x>y] is a functor which takes any number of arguments of class x and, together with these arguments, forms a phrase of class y. So the class of the functor itself is [x…x>y]. In other words, if a functor f belongs to the class [x...x>y], any phrase of which it is the head is of the class [y]; and each of its arguments is of the class [x].

Words of the class [Ap…Ap>S] are called “predicate-cores”. We can use the symbol "[Pc]" as an abbreviation for "[Ap…Ap>S]". A predicate-core is a bit like a predicate in Loglan; however, it doesn’t have an order-based place-structure; and it doesn't have a fixed number of arguments. Syntactically speaking, a predicate-core can take any number of arguments (including 0) (even though some combinations of arguments might not make sense semantically speaking). Each of the arguments of a predicate-core will be an adverbial phrase [Ap]. The phrase thus formed will be a statement [S].

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 are called 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.