Message-Id: <199412052246.AA28444@nfs2.digex.net> From: ucleaar Date: Mon Dec 5 17:46:34 1994 Subject: Re: (1) loi; (2) le v. la In-Reply-To: (Your message of Sun, 04 Dec 94 16:30:20 EST.) <199412042130.AA15075@access4.digex.net> Status: RO X-From-Space-Date: Mon Dec 5 17:46:34 1994 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN%CUVMB.BITNET@uga.cc.uga.edu > >Perhaps I am biased by English, since, so far as I am aware, everything > >in English is +veridical. Consequently I may lack the appropriate > >intuitions about -veridical. > > English is certainly NOT veridical. Among other things, we use metonymy > heavily, and metonymy is inconsistent with veridicality. "The White House > announced a new policy last night." Houses do not announce. And is the > policy really "new"? Then there is the classic JCB example of ""le" > "That man is really a woman". "That man" cannot be veridical if the statement > is true. I take it that veridicality is a relationship between a sentence and the proposition (or fragment thereof) the grammar allows us to derive from the sentence. Given the word "milk", we derive a reference to something that is milk. From "The White House announced a new policy" the grammar derives a proposition which is something like "There is a house and there is a policy and the policy is new, and the house announced the policy". From "That man is really a woman" we derive something like "there is a man that is a woman". Thus both sentences are veridical: the grammar cannot derive from these sentences the propositions 'the banana announced a banana' or 'that banana is really a woman'. This is why English is veridical. Both the grammar-derived propositions expressed by the sentences you give are (in all likelihood) false. From here we leave language in the strict sense, and move into more general areas of cognition and communication. From the propositions the grammar derives from the sentences, we can derive further propositions, e.g. by processes of figurative thought. Thus we can take the 'literal' grammar-determined propositions expressed by your two sentences, and from these propositions use those general pragmatic processes to derive the propositions 'The president announced a policy he said was new' and 'What appears to be a man is really a woman'. This is pragmatics, and of course is very interesting, especially to linguists, but it is certainly beyond the bounds of grammar. Perhaps I have misunderstood what veridicality is. Perhaps it acts as metalinguistic pragmatic constraint denying figurative derivations. A weird notion, but interesting. I imagine it would be hard to square with fuzzy categories. In this case English would be nonveridical, though a few words, like "literally", would serve as markers of veridicality. ----- And