Méırıe

A ton of work has gone into Kuna over the past year, and now that it's grown into what can finally be called a wide-coverage semantic parser (a first for the world of loglangs!), I'd like to mark the occasion with a release. While there are still a few important features missing before we can say that it understands all of Toaq's grammar, this means that Kuna is now tested on a modestly large fragment of the grammar and welcomes bug reports. Please give it a try!

Supported grammar

Among my proudest accomplishments with this release are that Kuna can now denote:

• Donkey anaphora
  • Kıaı tú poq, ꝡë bo hóa báq aqshe, áqshe.
  • Shê, ꝡä bo báq poq báq aqshe, nä kıaı póq áqshe.
• Questions
  • Pu tao hí poq hí raı râo hí daq?
  • Ao jea súq shíukune rí góso?
• Reflexives and reciprocals
  • Kıaı nhûq chéq úmo áq ba.
• Fronted adjuncts
  • Dûo kóacao nä bu sula nıaoshua.
• Topics
  • Ké patı bï marao hú shı.
• Interjections, vocatives, parentheticals (in some positions)
  • Jadı, buetı jí hóı máma.
  • Kóacao (kïo he cho jí báq koacao kı) bï baı jí báq nıaopoq.

It's worth mentioning that the grammar that Kuna implements differs in a number of ways from Toaq Delta, aligning broadly with the grammar taught in Koitieq. Most notably:

• Content clauses are DPs
  • In the low glottal tone (ké juna, ꝡä …), complementizers modify a preceding noun
  • To appear directly in argument position, complementizers take the rising tone (ꝡá ruqshua)
• Variables created with ló have no semantic content apart from their name
• Indefinites (báq) scope out of scope islands

In most cases these decisions were made in the interest of getting a workable theory of Toaq's semantics out the door, addressing problems that came up while trying to implement it. But I remain very much interested in bringing Kuna's grammar back into alignment with official Toaq grammar, whether that means dialing back some of Kuna's more surprising choices or else receiving Hoemai's blessing for them.

Not yet supported

Here are the most important corners of the grammar that Kuna doesn't cover yet:

• Focus
• Degrees
• (c 1) and (c 2) serials
• Telicity
• Discursives
• Fancy aspects (chum, fı)
• Definite DPs that reference quantified variables (also known as 'skolemization')
• Quantifiers that appear without a corresponding báq (as in he cho jí ní)
• Relative clauses that reference their antecedent via a variable name or animacy pronoun
• jü, gö

Making Kuna understandable

Much work remains to be done to turn Kuna into a more accessible tool to learn about the meanings of Toaq texts. But this release already brings some interesting features for shedding light on how Kuna works:

• With the inspector panel, you can dive into any phrase and step through the composition process to see how Kuna derived its meaning from the meanings of its parts.
• There is now a dedicated help panel acting as a cheat sheet for the types found in denotation trees.
• And a new graphical sıteleq format for types aims to bring iconicity and clear visual structure to these more complex expression types.

Last but not least, Láqme has been hard at work on Méı'aq, a guide to help you navigate the theory of effectful, denotational semantics found in Kuna.

I hope you find Kuna a valuable tool for investigating Toaq's grammar! I'll leave you with a couple of example sentences: Can you use Kuna to figure out how they differ in meaning?

• Koı jí lîeı sía tıeq.
• Koı jí lîeı sîa tıeq.

— jíbı Kía