From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Wed Jun 28 00:56:33 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 16690 invoked from network); 28 Jun 2000 07:56:31 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m2.onelist.org with QMQP; 28 Jun 2000 07:56:31 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO argo.bas.bg) (195.96.224.7) by mta1 with SMTP; 28 Jun 2000 07:56:30 -0000 Received: from banmatpc.math.bas.bg (root@banmatpc.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.2]) by argo.bas.bg (8.11.0.Beta1/8.9.3/Debian 8.9.3-6) with ESMTP id e5S7uPc13507 for ; Wed, 28 Jun 2000 10:56:25 +0300 Received: from iad.math.bas.bg (iad.math.bas.bg [195.96.243.88]) by banmatpc.math.bas.bg (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id KAA17097 for ; Wed, 28 Jun 2000 10:56:25 +0300 Message-ID: <3959AFE0.6E7D@math.bas.bg> Date: Wed, 28 Jun 2000 10:57:20 +0300 Reply-To: iad@math.bas.bg Organization: Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01Gold (Win95; I; 16bit) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: The Lojban List Subject: Re: [lojban] RECORD: containers Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" wrote: > At 04:14 PM 06/25/2000 -0700, Jorge Llambias wrote: > >This is the point. If we take the place structures seriously, > >ta is actually being a botpi only when it contains something, > >a side effect of the inflated place structures. > > No. What is being missed here, and may affect the RECORD statement > as well, is that Loglan/Lojban considers potential tenses to be > equivalent to actual tenses for purposes of defining predicates, > in the absence of context. Thus a bottle "for" wine is one where > the potential is deemed notable that the contents will be wine, > even if there is no actual wine contents now. Which is why Jorge said `is actually being a botpi' rather than just `is a botpi'. As in {ta caca'a botpi .ijeku'i ta caca'a botpi noda}. Haigha's potential for passing doesn't make him an actual passer to anyone but the White King, if he has passed nobody on this occasion; how then can something be an actual bottle whilst it isn't bottling anything? Or does `vacuum' count as a default bottlee? pycyn@aol.com wrote: > For now we are stuck with the reasonable appeal to common sense > to sort the cases out -- not a good position for a logic, though > a common one for langauges Well, Lojban is a language first, and a logical one afterwards. In those cases where we don't know how logic handles something, the best it can do is handle it as languages do. > (Robin the Turk had a note from someone who said logic was > incompatible with language and it is cases like this that give > the person's claim some force -- until they are taken care of.) And it's the people who take care of them that are called linguists, unlike the ones who make such claims, or believe them. In this case Yu.D. Apresjan's work on lexical semantics comes to mind; he talks about a difference between strong and weak semantic government -- obligatory vs optional participants in a relation or eventuality. So a passee is under strong semantic government (there must be one for passing to take place) while a bottlee is under weak semantic government (something can actually be a bottle without bottling anything). Problematic for some formalisms, perhaps, but not for logic in general. --Ivan