Vaporized squirrel (cleft places)

[cbmvax!uunet!math.ucla.edu!jimc]

Here is a short text in which occurs a number of cleft place
constructions.  You can judge for yourself the consequence of
de-cleaving them.  For each line I have given (a) Lojban; (b) literal
English translation, (c) colloquial English.  In some cases two rows of
Lojban are shown with cleft and uncleft versions.  Parenthesized
numbers refer to notes and commentary at the end.  

.i fi'o (1) ki   purci djedi lo'i (2) remei fe'u lo ricratcu
   /modal bridi/ past  days  set      2    /end/ a squirrel (tree rat)
Two days ago a squirrel 

cu zernerkla     lo galfi be loi dikca (3) 
   crime-in-come modifier of electricity
snuck onto an electrical transformer

.i jae bo (4) le ricratcu cu se galfi    fi loi gapci
   result     the squirrel   was changed into gas
and was vaporized

.i jae bo le cabra      cu pofbi'o (binxo le nu le[pa]fi'e spofu (5))
   result the equipment    broke   (became      it         was broken)
breaking the equipment

.i je (6) lei dikca       cu se fleri'u (7) fi lemi dinju
  and     the electricity    was held back  from my building (cleft places)
.i je se fanta le nu lei dikca       cu flecu  lemi dinju
  and prevented      the electricity    flowed to my building (uncleft)
and interrupting electricity to my building.

.i .eito'efu'i (8)        
   obligation (difficult)
I had to 

mi rinka le nu lo so'i skami  cu sisti (9) le nu lefi'e sazri   kei kei 
I  cause          many computers cease           they   operate /endmarks/
mi sazrstiri'a lo si'i skami
I  turn off (10)  many computers (diklujvo, cleft)
turn off computers 

tai le nu mi (11) te'uga'e seva'o le nu manku (12) (fi'o manku? )
method    I       feel     environment  something is dark
by feel in the dark

.i semu'i bo  lo'e nu lei dikca    cu xrufle (13) cu rinka (13a)
   motivation (events) electricity    returns     causes
because when the power returns 

lo'e nu le se sazrstiri'a (14) piso'oroi (15) pofbi'o
(events) the turned-off things sometimes      break
it sometimes breaks the machines we turn off.
---------
Notes:   
(1) I can't get a good "two days ago" with a BAI phrase, hence
I converted a bridi to a modal operator with fi'o...fe'u.  ki = set
tense default.

(2) Using the permitted but not required convention that lo'i remei
"the set of pairs" is acceptable in slots like this to mean how many
days.

(3) Electrical transformer = transformer of electricity = lo galfi be 
loi dikca.  dicngai would be neater.  With diklujvo rules it would reduce
to the same phrase, but lacking diklujvo people could say, "well, it's a
tanru so it means whatever you want".  Anyway, with uncleft places for
galfi what are you going to say: lo gasnu be lo nu galfi loi dikca?  Let's
put it this way: Zipf would roll over in his grave, and the users will
use dicngai rejecting the rules.

(4) .i jae bo: I am using bo on all modal sentence connectives to
prevent the first sumti from being eaten.

(5) Zipf rolls over again; now he's right side up :-)

(6) I rely on standard Lojban associativity: A causes (B causes (C and D)).

(7) On fleri'u vs. the uncleft version, both forms are almost equally
efficient in their use of words.  Unfortunately the diklujvo doesn't
use the 8/9/88  definition of rinju which is "restrain/keep
...(obj./event) under ...".   I used this one: "x1 restrains x2 from
doing x3" (cleft).  For the uncleft version, fanta "prevent" fits the
meaning much better.  The key issue here is whether we want lujvo-oids
like fleri'u to be natural, or whether it will be mandatory to split
them up into separate explicit phrases.

(8) I hope I got the order right, here: main indicator, nai (not used here),
intensity, area.  fu'i is identified as a "modifier", I assume an area
modifier (??).  However, to'e (polar opposite) is supposed to apply to
fu'i, not to .ei.  There may be an associativity problem.

(9) Both English and Lojban fail to catch the actual meaning.  The power
failure causes them to stop operating.  But when the power comes back, it
is our experience that there's a surge, which eats power supplies.  Thus
we throw the switches to "off" even though that action is nugatory in
the context of making the computers stop.  

(10) This one's a real good advertisement for both diklujvo and cleft
places.  The in-full version is outrageously complicated and long. 
sazrstiri'a "turn off" obviously can't be assigned a gismu.  If you
make it an official lujvo then the Lojban leadership commits itself to 
officiating endless tens of thousands of these things -- and commits
the users to learning them.  To call it an abbreviated tanru is not 
adequate as a solution because neither the meaning nor the places fit
the independent last term rinka, and also the meaning of a tanru is so
vague that we don't want to hang solid communications on it.  Finally,
the majority of natural language speakers (sez I) see "turn off" as a
transitive relation between an actor and an actee (the equipment); the
in-full version swamps such a relation, whereas the diklujvo form
simultaneously caters to the user's notions in the surface form and
offers a route to produce precisely the in-full form as a deep structure.
Why cleft places?  See (14).

(11) This repeated "mi" is obnoxious.  Yes, I could ellipse, but I *want*
to be precise about who's feeling, and preferably about what's being
felt.  The -gua!spi replication rules will deliver "mi" automatically
because (the equivalent of) tadji/tai has a cleft place; the actor is
retro-replicated into this place out of the modified main phrase, and is
then replicated into the "le nu" phrase (generated as a diklujvo).  Are
you drooling yet to get this capability?

(12) I want the environment of the main bridi to be "dark"; I'll settle
for the main bridi referents themselves to be dark.  I think neither
version hits this meaning exactly, though they come close.

(13) xruti flecu (return flow) makes a nice parallel diklujvo but doesn't
quite catch the meaning of "flow again".  I don't see a good "again" gismu
in the list.

(13a) Neither "le nu" sentence is asserted; only the causal relation is
asserted.  Thus I chose not to use .i ri'a bo (sentence connective) but
to make rinka a main selbri.  Note that I'm cheating on the definition
of rinka: I use "event causes event" whereas I think the definition that
has appeared most often on the list recently is "actor causes event".
Sic semper casus fissus (if you'll pardon my 1st year Latin).

(14) By the ghost of Zipf, I dare you to translate this with uncleft
places! The "thing turned off" is too deeply buried in nested abstract
sumti.  You have to have the operands of a transitive relation remain
at the top level, being copied not moved into the interior phrases.  In
other words, you need both halves of the cleft place.  

(15) Comments are welcome on the adequacy of piso'oroi as a "sometimes"
tense.

		-- jimc