Tim32

CONTEXTUALnessNESSessNESS ^

Posted On Thursday 1 March 2012 by Murray Colpman (Muzer)

We've added a way to accurately reference any previously-mentioned noun or clause in Timlan, as long as the speaker has a good memory ;)

To that end, we've added three new words:

to - refers to the object of n sentences ago (default: 1)
ta - refers to the subject of n sentences ago (default: 1)
tq - refers to the clause n sentences ago (default: 1)

Examples:

= "My cat is blue. It is cute."

= "My cat is blue. The blue is shiny."

= "My cat is blue. I like that."

These can be stacked, in two different ways. The trees always start from the root clause (indicated by the first non-supplement word). First, as one might expect, they can use possessives:

= "I like my cat that is eating pasta. It is cute."

= "I like my cat that is eating pasta. The pasta is lush."

If the tree ends on a relative clause, the subject or object of the clause (depening on whether rela or relo is used) are inherited by default. So, the first sentence above can be phrased simply:

= "I like my cat that is eating pasta. It is cute."

If you wish to refer to a clause, you must always end the tree with "tq". This will stop parsers (people, programs) from inheriting nouns from relative clauses, but must also be used for referring to any clause, just for clarity purposes:

= "I like my cat that is eating pasta. The fact that it is eating pasta is good."

Trees have a short form, as using so many "ami"s could get tiresome. The short form is simply concatenating all of the "to"s, "ta"s and "tq"s into one word:

= "I like my cat that is eating pasta. It is cute."

= "I like my cat that is eating pasta. The fact that it is eating pasta is good."

Finally, an ordinal number can be prepended to change the number of sentences ago you are referring to. The previous sentence (the default) is c-ah, the sentence before that (for instance) is d-ah, and the current sentence (not easy to use in speech, but possible in written things!) is b-ah:

= "I like my cat that is eating pasta. Cats are animals. It [my cat] is cute."