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Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2014 10:24:17 +0200
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Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2
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la'o me. Martin Bays .me cusku di'e
>>   kukte fa lo plise .e su'a nai re lo ci plise noi vi zvati
>
> OK, I think that does rule out \iota! If domain shifting were allowed
> within a single proposition like that, we'd need to find a new way to
> understand quantifiers, and the sky would generally fall in.
>
> So maybe {lo} isn't quite \iota, but it's something like "\iota applied
> to some ad-hoc but somehow natural subset of the extension"? If that
> isn't to reduce to just "lo broda is something(s) satisfying broda",
> this "natural" will have to be doing a lot of work... I don't have much
> of an idea what it could be.
>
> Possibly it can all be done by specifying the tense and aspect of
> {broda}? With the kind reading corresponding to gnomic aspect?

I definitely think tense can do a lot of this (maybe even all of it) 
while retaining maximality. For example, when there are two cats in the 
room, one black and one white:

    (1) lo mlatu cu xekri

would be false if {lo mlatu} had to include both cats (and xekri is 
distributive), so one could consider it a misleading statement in that 
context. However, it is still true that:

    (2) lo mlatu vi xekri .i je lo mlatu va blabi

if we choose to read {lo mlatu} as Mr. Cat, while:

    (3) lo vi mlatu cu xekri .i je lo va mlatu cu blabi

can be read easily as two different cats (satisfying the two different 
predicates {vi mlatu} and {va mlatu}).

Therefore the original statement (1) could be saved by saying that {lo 
mlatu} has implicit tense that restricts the cats we know to be in the 
domain to those satisfying that implicit tense. How legitimate this is 
as a general rule to use in real-life communication is another question, 
but it would save certain usages of {lo} from being outlawed. Certainly 
tense can be implicit anywhere else in the language, so it wouldn't be 
strange at all for it to be implicit here, would it? (In misleading 
cases, one should of course not leave tense up to context, but this, 
too, applies throughout the language)

I have also used the gnomic aspect to describe the generic reading, but 
we don't currently have a cmavo that indicates gnomic aspect. I have 
proposed to redefine the underused {na'o} as gnomic aspect, but we can 
use something else too.

mi'e la selpa'i mu'o

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