(From Lognet 90/3)

Sau La Keugru (From the Caretaking-Group = Academy)

An internal decision was made to change the grammar of vocatives by removing them from the <freemod> grameme and making them <terms>. This permits considerably more complex vocative expressions, such as the one in Lo Nurvia Logla in this issue.

The Academy also decided to accept negative register markers, as proposed by Stephen Rice. An example of their use might be: Levi penbi no rie ga no srite. =This disrespectful pen doesn’t write.

Treating the new register markers as attitudinals was discussed in this column in LN 90/1:8. The parenthetical remark made then that negative register markers implied negative attitudinals no longer applies. The register markers have been put in the <freemod> grameme but not in the UI lexeme.

In NB3:118, a reason was given why sentence predicates could not have a kekked head unit while descriptive predicates could. This led to some undesirable inconsistencies in parsing. The Grammarian proposed a change which makes parsing identical in both cases; this too has been accepted by the Academy. Unless final in the predicate string, the kekked predicate must now be followed by gu to separate it from any following predicate words. For example, in ka preda ki prede predi, the last predicate, predi, is the modificand of prede, and so falls within the scope of ki. So the whole expression will parse as (ka preda ki (prede predi)). In ka preda ki prede gu predi, however, predi is the modificand of which the whole kekked predicate is the modifier: (ka preda ki prede gu) predi. Such expressions may now occur in both sentence predicates and descriptive ones.

It has been suggested that an appropriate opening for a letter to John from Bob would be Hoi Djan, the addressee (O John), with the closing expression being Hue Bab, a "reverse vocative" specifying the addressor (literally Said Bob). Grammatically both are freemod utterances. Comments are invited. (Previously, one suggested closing was I mi bi la Bab.)

A problem was noted with L1:203 sentence 5: Lemi da gudbi letu de (Mine is better than yours). It was noted that the two free variables da and de, which are elsewhere always arguments, were here being used in a predicative way. Although the grammar had been specially modified to permit this, the Academy decided that the correct usage should be Lemi meda gudbi letu mede, where the free variables are converted to predicates with me. This was always grammatical, and the originally ungrammatical nature of L1:203(5) has been restored.