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Date: Mon, 25 Sep 1995 14:09:34 -0400
From: John Cowan <cowan@LOCKE.CCIL.ORG>
Subject: Re: {soi}
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la .and. cusku di'e
 
> la djan cusku die [incidentally, if John is {djan}, and Jen
> is {djen}, what is Jan? Are Jan & Jen homophonous in Gen.
> American? Ah, no, Jan would be {dji,yn} wouldn't it, because
> Ann is homophonous with Ian.]
 
Well, in my dialect "John" is [dZAn], "Jen" is [dZEn], and "Jan" is
[dZ&n].  Only in 2nd-vowel-shifted dialects is "Ann" [i:,@n]; for me it
is [&:n].  In the South, of course, [En] > [In], so "Jen" is [dZIn].
 
> Perhaps this relates to the issue of how anaphoric references to
> pluralities work: does {re prenu cu prami py} mean they each love
> themself, or does it mean they each love each of them? I think
> Jorge & others were debating this for each of the systems of
> anaphora, but I forget (or never knew) what the upshot was.
 
Me either.
 
> Does it refer (in some sense) to a previous word/phrase? Or does it
> refer to the referent of a specific previous word/phrase? Or does it
> refer to an individual (typically not a word) that has already been
> referred to? If the last of these, then it ought to be possible to
> use a {le} or {la} expression within {soi ... seu}. I gather from
> what you say that that should indeed be possible.
 
I take it that strictly it refers to a >place<, a terbridi; but that
an anaphoric reference to the occupant of the place should do.
 
> I discern an ambiguity in the (English) use of "sumti" here. On the
> one hand it usually means "syntactic argument" or "semantic argument",
> while on the other hand it here means something more like "nominal
> expression", "NP" rather than "S", an expression with type <e> rather
> than type <t>.
 
Yes, English "sumti" tends to mean "NP".
 
> > Not all sumti that refer to other sumti are lexical items;
> > "le se go'i"; "le go'e", etc.
>
> But they're still lexical: they're {lo valsi}, albeit not {pa valsi}.
 
Then I'm still more confused.  Everything that can be said is {lo valsi};
what would be a non-lexical occupant?
 
> > > And is that 'reference' in the sense of 'referent'
> > > or in the sense of 'cross-reference/pointer'?
> > I'm not sure I can make this distinction.
>
> In a book most words refer to something (in the sense of building up
> a communicable picture of the world), but only expressions like
> "see page 30" are cross-references/pointers.
 
Yes, I grasp this point, but I'm not sure how the distinction applies.
 
> "Selbri" denotes a syntactic funtion, the grammatical predicate,
> and "brivla" denotes words that can function as "selbri".
 
This is correct.
 
--
John Cowan                                      cowan@ccil.org
                e'osai ko sarji la lojban.