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To Boston Via The Road Go I, With An Excursion Into The Land Of Modals - The Lojban Reference Grammar
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The Lojban Reference Grammar
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<h3><a id="s5" name="s5">5. Modal places: FIhO, FEhU</h3>
<p>The following cmavo are discussed in this section:</p>
<pre>
fi'o FIhO modal place prefix
fe'u FEhU modal terminator
</pre>
<p>Sometimes the place structures engineered into Lojban are
inadequate to meet the needs of actual speech. Consider the
gismu ``viska'', whose place structure is:</p>
<p></p>
<dl>
<dt></dt>
<dd>x1 sees x2 under conditions x3</dd>
</dl>
<p>Seeing is a threefold relationship, involving an agent (le
viska), an object of sight (le se viska), and an environment
that makes seeing possible (le te viska). Seeing is done with
one or more eyes, of course; in general, the eyes belong to the
entity in the x1 place.</p>
<p>Suppose, however, that you are blind in one eye and are
talking to someone who doesn't know that. You might want to
say, ``I see you with the left eye.'' There is no place in the
place structure of ``viska'' such as ``with eye x4'' or the
like. Lojban allows you to solve the problem by adding a new
place, changing the relationship:</p>
<pre>
<a id="e5d1"
name="e5d1">5.1)</a> mi viska do fi'o kanla [fe'u] le zunle
I see you [modal] eye: the left-thing
I see you with the left eye.
</pre>
The three-place relation ``viska'' has now acquired a fourth
place specifying the eye used for seeing. The combination of
the cmavo ``fi'o'' (of selma'o FIhO) followed by a selbri, in
this case the gismu ``kanla'', forms a tag which is prefixed to
the sumti filling the new place, namely ``le zunle''. The
semantics of ``fi'o kanla le zunle'' is that ``le zunle'' fills
the x1 place of ``kanla'', whose place structure is
<dl>
<dt></dt>
<dd>x1 is an/the eye of body x2</dd>
</dl>
Thus ``le zunle'' is an eye. The x2 place of ``kanla'' is
unspecified and must be inferred from the context. It is
important to remember that even though ``le zunle'' is placed
following ``fi'o kanla'', semantically it belongs in the x1
place of ``kanla''. The selbri may be terminated with ``fe'u''
(of selma'o FEhU), an elidable terminator which is rarely
required unless a non-logical connective follows the tag
(omitting ``fe'u'' in that case would make the connective
affect the selbri).
<p>The term for such an added place is a ``modal place'', as
distinguished from the regular numbered places. (This use of
the word ``modal'' is specific to the Loglan Project, and does
not agree with the standard uses in either logic or
linguistics, but is now too entrenched to change easily.) The
``fi'o'' construction marking a modal place is called a ``modal
tag'', and the sumti which follows it a ``modal sumti''; the
purely Lojban terms ``sumti tcita'' and ``seltcita sumti'',
respectively, are also commonly used. Modal sumti may be placed
anywhere within the bridi, in any order; they have no effect
whatever on the rules for assigning unmarked bridi to numbered
places, and they may not be marked with FA cmavo.</p>
<p>Consider <a href="#e5d1">Example 5.1</a> again. Another way
to view the situation is to consider the speaker's left eye as
a tool, a tool for seeing. The relevant selbri then becomes
``pilno'', whose place structure is</p>
<dl>
<dt></dt>
<dd>x1 uses x2 as a tool for purpose x3</dd>
</dl>
and we can rewrite <a href="#e5d1">Example 5.1</a> as
<pre>
<a id="e5d2"
name="e5d2">5.2)</a> mi viska do fi'o se pilno le zunle kanla
I see you [modal] [conversion] use: the left eye
I see you using my left eye.
</pre>
<p>Here the selbri belonging to the modal is ``se pilno''. The
conversion of ``pilno'' is necessary in order to get the
``tool'' place into x1, since only x1 can be the modal sumti.
The ``tool user'' place is the x2 of ``se pilno'' (because it
is the x1 of ``pilno'') and remains unspecified. The tag ``fi'o
pilno'' would mean ``with tool user'', leaving the tool
unspecified.</p>
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The Lojban Reference Grammar
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Modal tags: BAI
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