From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Tue Jun 8 10:48:32 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 8 Jun 1993 04:53:18 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 0177; Tue, 08 Jun 93 04:52:18 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 3012; Tue, 08 Jun 93 04:53:37 EDT Date: Tue, 8 Jun 1993 09:48:32 +0100 Reply-To: Colin Fine Sender: Lojban list From: Colin Fine Subject: Re: observatives (was JimC on Colin on ....... ad nauseam) To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: Cowan responds to me: > I'm not clear on the distinction you are making here. If a sentence has >no x1, it is an observative in every sense. It may be that the x1 is >supplied from some other piece of linguistic behavior rather than from >the non-linguistic context (specifically, the previous bridi), but what >of that? I guess that what I'm saying (and I think I've said elsewhere) is that I don't see any milage in the term 'observative'. If it is a syntactic term for 'bridi with omitted x1' fair enough, though I think the justification for having such a term is slender. But I had taken it to have some special semantic connotation (that I've never been quite happy about) - perhaps an implied "ju'i" or "ko zgana lenu". The point I intended to make was that, though omission of the x1 was facilitated to allow observatives in that latter sense, it is in fact being used much more widely. Colin