Message-Id: <199709260403.XAA05435@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS Date: Thu Sep 25 23:03:38 1997 Sender: Lojban list From: JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS Subject: Re: LE and VOI X-To: lojban To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0015 Content-Length: 2257 X-From-Space-Date: Thu Sep 25 23:03:38 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU And: >So the following combos are useful: > >1 nonspecific, veridical >2 specific, veridical, "indefinite" (= referent not (necessarily) > identifiable by addressee) >3 specific, nonveridical, "definite" (= referent not (necessarily) > identifiable by addressee) > >Function 1 is performed by {lo}. Functions 2 & 3 are both >performed by {le}. Both 2 & 3 are useful, & it wd be nice to >think of an easy way to distinguish them. Your martini example shows that combo 3 is useful, and that's what we have. I don't see in what case is combo 2 useful. My impression is that when you have specificity, veridicality becomes irrelevant. A specific reference is just a tag on the referent, much like a name. It doesn't make sense to ask whether a name is veridical or not: all it matters is whether it succeeds in identifying its referent or not. When you want to make a claim about a specific cat for example, the tag "mlatu" is usually the most convenient, and so people will usually prefer "veridical" tags, not in order to make a claim but to identify the referent easily. Even for indefinite specifics (I take that to mean things like "the oldest cat in the world", is that right?) even for them veridicality is not required: is the description enough for your audience to identify which referent you mean, at least in principle? Then there's no need for you to be claiming that your referent actually is the oldest cat in the world. You may go ahead and claim that as well, but your claim will be obvious to your audience anyway if they identified correctly what you referred to with your tag. For specific reference, veridicality is mostly irrelevant. For non-specific reference veridicality is useful, because it is a convenient way of informing your audince over which set you're running your quantifiers. You forgot combo 4 in your list above: 4 nonspecific, nonveridical which is what we have in things like {su'o le mlatu} = "at least one of the cats of which I'm talking about". Here the set over which we quantify is referred to nonveridically. (In most cases it will consist of real cats, but it doesn't matter as long as our audience understands which so-called cats are the members of the set over which we quantify.) co'o mi'e xorxes