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| This {{proposal}}, which may colloquially be termed the {{class|kü}} proposal, wishes to merge two features of the language: | | This {{proposal}}, which may colloquially be termed the {{class|kü}} proposal, wishes to merge three features of the language: |
| * [[Focus marker]]s, which attach to words or phrases and which express a relation of the marked material with respect to the rest of the clause – e.g., {{t|kú}} highlights information that the listener should consider as new and important, {{t|tó}} states it is only this choice of value that satisfies the clause, etc. For instance, {{t|Chuq jí kú máoja}} would translate as ‘I am eating ''the banana''’ or ‘It is the banana that I’m eating’. | | * [[Focus marker]]s, like {{t|kú}} (pure focus), {{t|máo}} ‘also’ and {{t|tó}} ‘only’. |
| * [[Cleft]]s, or {{t|nä}} phrases, which allow one to place a noun phrase or an adverbial at the front of a clause, and in the former case refer back to the noun phrase with {{t|hóa}}, primarily for convenience and not for focus. For instance, {{t|Máoja nä chuq jí hóa}} is another way of saying {{t|Chuq jí máoja}} but possibly more convenient (especially if instead of {{t|máoja}} we’re dealing with a looong phrase). | | * [[Cleft]]s using {{t|nä}}, like {{t|Máoja nä chuq jí hóa}} ‘I eat the bananas’. |
| * [[Topic|Topic phrases]], or {{t|bï}} phrases, which serve the opposite function to focus markers: they set the backdrop or context for the focused information. For instance, {{t|Báq maoja bï, bu cho jí hóa}} ‘As far as bananas go, I don’t like them’. | | * [[Topic|Topic phrases]], introduced by {{t|bï}}, like {{t|Báq maoja bï, he bu cho jí hóa}} ‘As far as bananas go, I don’t like them’. |
| As a fun fact, the English construction found in ‘It is the banana that I’m eating’, which extracts ‘the banana’ to the front of the clause this way, is itself called a [[wikipedia:cleft|cleft (Wikipedia link)]]! You should see where we’re going with this.
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| ==The tofu<ref>assuming the [[wikipedia:vegetarianism|vegetarianism]] proposal applies</ref> of the proposal== | | == Focus marker clefts == |
| :We’ll be assuming [[User:Lynn|Lynn]]’s [[Simple Focus]] proposal applies. (tl;dr, it makes all {{class|kú}} always bear {{done|2}}, displacing the complex and incomplete rules found in the refgram, and also makes some additional statements about the scope prefixes operate on, which is ''also'' irregular officially.) It also frees {{done|3}} for us, which will be useful right below:
| | We’ll be assuming the [[Simple Focus]] proposal applies. It makes all focus markers always bear {{done|2}}, displacing the complex and incomplete rules found in the refgram. It also frees {{done|3}} for us, which will be useful right below: |
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| ===The part where we let focus markers be clefts===
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| Essentially, allow {{t|{{small caps|focus}} {{class|kü}} {{small caps|phrase}}}}, with exactly the same semantics as {{t|{{class|kú}} {{small caps|focus}} nä {{small caps|phrase}}}}. {{t|hóa}} is still bound in case of a noun phrase. Examples examples: | | Essentially, allow {{t|{{small caps|focus}} {{class|kü}} {{small caps|phrase}}}}, with exactly the same semantics as {{t|{{class|kú}} {{small caps|focus}} nä {{small caps|phrase}}}}. {{t|hóa}} is still bound in case of a noun phrase. Examples examples: |
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| :[= {{t|Tó ní chuao nä deq peo báq kanı hóa}}] | | :[= {{t|Tó ní chuao nä deq peo báq kanı hóa}}] |
| :[= {{t|Deq peo báq kanı tó ní chuao}}] | | :[= {{t|Deq peo báq kanı tó ní chuao}}] |
| :‘It is just this hole that rabbits are allowed to pass’ | | :‘It is just this hole that rabbits are able to pass’ |
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| :{{t|He râo báq kıachaq bëı loı jí tú}} | | :{{t|He râo báq kıachaq bëı loı jí tú}} |
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| :‘It’s on Mondays (not on some other implied occasion / under some other implied condition) that I hate everything’ | | :‘It’s on Mondays (not on some other implied occasion / under some other implied condition) that I hate everything’ |
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| | The win from this is that you get to combine focus and clefting, bringing the focused material to the front. This operation would remain optional, i.e., {{t|Chuq jí kú máoja}} would still remain in the language for you to use. |
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| The win from this is that you get to combine focus and clefting, bringing the focused material to the front. This operation would remain optional, i.e., {{t|Chuq jí kú máoja}} would still remain in the language for you to use. The minor downside is that the signposting particle that announces focus – in this case, {{t|kü}} – now comes ''after'' the focused material. | | == The focus marker {{t|bí}} == |
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| ===The part where we let topic phrases be a focus marker===
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| The idea is to take the generic pattern above, flip it, and apply it to {{t|bï}}: | | The idea is to take the generic pattern above, flip it, and apply it to {{t|bï}}: |
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| : {{t|{{small caps|phrase}} bï, {{small caps|phrase}} nä {{small caps|clause}}}}. | | : {{t|{{small caps|phrase}} bï, {{small caps|phrase}} nä {{small caps|clause}}}}. |
| In other words, the focused (or should I say topicked?) clause is reasserted (kept intact), but also raised/copied as the topic. So for {{t|Fa jí bí râo níchaq}}, instead of ‘As for [something being] today, I go’ (see reference), we should expect ‘As for [something being] today, I go today’. | | In other words, the focused (or should I say topicked?) clause is reasserted (kept intact), but also raised/copied as the topic. So for {{t|Fa jí bí râo níchaq}}, instead of ‘As for [something being] today, I go’ (see reference), we should expect ‘As for [something being] today, I go today’. |
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| ====A technical aside owing to {{t|bï}}’s semantics====
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| : tl;dr: Officially, {{t|bï}} should only take definite references. I posit that this means that {{t|bï}}’s topic must be reducible to something like λ𝑥′. 𝑥′ = 𝑥 for some predetermined 𝑥 : e. The section aims to expand this notion to all plausible topic phrase types if {{t|bí}} is to be expected to make any sense.
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| {{t|bï}} is restricted to definite references – cross-linguistically, topic phrases cannot include an indefinite referent (‘as for some crocheting’ only makes sense if we read ‘some’ as {{t|ké}}; as {{t|sá}} it is infelicitous). For this reason, we need to set down a definition of what it means for a noun phrase (and any other kind of phrase, given that {{t|bí}} would be allowed to attach to anything that {{class|kú}} can) to be “definite”. For this reason, we must stipulate that determiners which always denote a unique maximal reference, like {{t|ké}}, exophoric {{done|2}}, or experimental {{t|cúaq}} – are definite, but then outer quantification may be flaky:
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| : ?{{t|Chı tú poq, ꝡä póq bï, mıe hóa}} ‘Every person thinks that as far as that person goes, they’re alive’
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| Should this be allowed? (You tell me.) After all, within the scope of the {{t|ꝡä}}, {{t|póq}} is a reified maximal reference. But then this would not stop us from saying things like
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| : ?{{t|Tú poq nä póq bï, mıe hóa}} ‘Every person, as far as that person goes, is alive’,
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| which, by rote function application (since that’s what {{t|nä}}’s denotation is for noun phrases), boils down to
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| : *{{t|Tú poq bï, mıe hóa}},
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| which is known to be illicit. (Remember that the English phrasing ‘As for every person, they’re alive’ is misleading here – it invokes {{t|túq}} semantics, not {{t|tú}}!) Also, this doesn’t shed light on non-NP usages like {{t|bí râo níchaq}}/{{t|râo níchaq bï}}. Conversely, we can’t just ban usages of anaphors or quantification seeing as the following examples are all validly definite:
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| : {{t|Báq mala juku <u>sâ kanı</u> bï, uhuı hóa}} ‘Ones who have ever hunted a rabbit are evil’ (the predicate ‘who have ever hunted a rabbit’ is fully self-contained and can be {{t|báq}}ed into a definite reference)
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| : {{t|Hú poq nä, ké paı <u>hôa</u> bï, jaq zuoıde hóa}} ‘That person, as for their friend, they’re really elegant’ (beta-reducing the {{t|nä}} away we see that {{t|Ké paı hû poq bï, jaq zuoıde hóa}} is similarly self-contained and passes)
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| Let’s therefore carve out some theory by saying that a focus marker acts on an ordered pair of some '''fragment''' 𝑓 of type 𝘢 and some '''completion''' 𝑐′ of type 𝘢 → clause such that 𝑐′(𝑓) = 𝑐, the original clause. In other words, 𝑐′ could be understood as a “clause with a hole”, or a lambda expression with the bound variable appearing in place of the focused fragment. With that in place, we may treat focus markers as typed as 𝘢 → (𝘢 → clause) → clause. In the case of the {{t|ná}}/{{t|nä}} marker/cleft, for DPs specifically, its denotation is plain function specification: ⟦{{t|nä}}⟧ ≔ λ𝑓. λ𝑐′. 𝑐′(𝑓)), whereas other clefts do more convoluted semanticky things (such as attaching presuppositions) before putting the two cloven parts back together into a full clause. With this in hand we may posit a definition for definiteness which states that
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| : a phrase is '''definite''' within the context of a root (!) clause 𝑐 if a fragment–completion pair (𝑓, 𝑐′) '''may''' be expressed where 𝑓 is not a function with codomain t.
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| The peculiar ''root'' clause restriction lets us escape the gotcha that this section was introduced with.
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| For instance, consider the following decomposition of a usage of ⟦bí⟧:
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| : ⟦{{t|Cho jí bí báq rua}}⟧ = ⟦{{t|bí}}⟧(⟦{{t|báq rua}}⟧)(λ𝑓. ⟦{{t|cho jí}} 𝑓⟧)
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| All fine and good, but ⟦{{t|báq rua}}⟧ is of type ⟨e, t⟩. For definiteness, which we may understand as “having one, unique, maximal reference”, we should not accept a function with domain e, but a value that’s itself of type e. So in our case, if we assume {{t|báq}} if we refactor our decomposition as
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| : ⟦{{t|bí}}⟧(⟦{{t|báq rua}}⟧)(λ𝑓. ⟦{{t|cho jí}} 𝑓⟧) = ⟦{{t|bí}}⟧(rua-kind)((λ𝑓. ⟦{{t|cho jí jéı}} 𝑓⟧) (''Note: this is quite scuffed. I don’t exactly know how to expo this properly. If you know what’s going on then please edit as you please'')
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| Notice how this overlaps with the [[determiner test]], which states that a <code>(c 1)</code>-frame predicate 𝑃 is a determiner in disguise iff for all predicates 𝑄, {{t|sá}} 𝑃 𝑄 = {{t|tú}} 𝑃 𝑄 = {{t|báq}} 𝑃 𝑄 = etc., which another way to word is to say that 𝑃 : e → (e → t) → t is rephrasable as some 𝑃′ : (e → t) → e, which takes a unary predicate (e → t) and derives from it a unique reference (e). {{t|báq}}, {{t|ké}}, {{t|hú}} all have this property, which is to say that we may speak of a ⟦{{t|báq}}⟧′(⟦{{t|rua}}⟧) : e, which in the explication above was glossed over as “rua-kind”.
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| ==References== | | ==References== |
| <references/> | | <references/> |