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Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2014 19:28:16 -0400
From: Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2
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* Wednesday, 2014-10-15 at 10:24 +0200 - selpa'i <seladwa@gmx.de>:
> la'o me. Martin Bays .me cusku di'e
> > 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?
>=20
> I definitely think tense can do a lot of this (maybe even all of it)=20
> while retaining maximality.

It does make some sense that implicit tenses (etc) should be allowed in
sub-bridi.

To clarify: by a sub-bridi, I mean something like: a logical formula
(possibly with free variables) evaluated as part of the parse of
a sentence, including what I'll call the "implicit" sub-bridis which
don't correspond to a sentence or subsentence production. So e.g.
description sumti involve implicit sub-bridi, as do quantified selbri;
elsewhere in this thread, under the guise of "opaqueness vs
transparency", we're effectively discussing what other constructions
should involve implicit sub-bridi.

If implicit tenses are allowed in description sumti, I'd say they should
be allowed in all sub-bridi.

But then maybe we have a problem: if in your example
> there are two cats in the room, one black and one white
we consider {re mlatu cu zvati .i je lo mlatu cu xekri} as being
plausibly elliptical for {lo vi mlatu cu xekri}, shouldn't we consider
{re mlatu cu zvati .i je ro mlatu cu xekri} as being equally plausibly
elliptical for {ro vi mlatu cu xekri}? That seems strange to me.

I think it's pretty clear that we do want to allow implicit tenses in
abstractions, though. But perhaps not in relative clauses, for the same
reason as above?

Maybe not very important, but I wonder whether "implicit tense" isn't
just a Lojbanicism for something more general - that the situation
a sentence is talking about (e.g. claiming a proposition to be true of)
doesn't have to be at all specified explicitly, and in particular its
spatial and temporal position (or lack thereof) doesn't have to be
specified. So perhaps rather than asking whether sub-bridi have implicit
tenses, we should rather ask whether they have to be evaluated in the
same situation as the enclosing bridi, or whether they can introduce
a situation shift (and so in particular a domain shift).

> I have also used the gnomic aspect to describe the generic reading, but=
=20
> we don't currently have a cmavo that indicates gnomic aspect.

Aha, then probably I got that from you! I was trying to recall where
I came across "gnomic aspect"; you on irc sounds likely.

Martin

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