From LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Wed Sep 17 20:55:49 1997 Message-Id: <199709180155.UAA26637@locke.ccil.org> Date: Wed Sep 17 20:55:49 1997 Reply-To: Pycyn@AOL.COM Sender: Lojban list From: "John E. Clifford" Subject: nitcu X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0001 Content-Length: 2488 (aol is back to screwing around with addresses again, so I'll try with the handwritten rather than the automatic after today's bounce note.) Lojbab has passed this one on to me, the negationwallah. But I -- anticipating the new book which I then have not yet ordered -- have put my old stuff in some deep hole. So I do not have a copy of the gismu list and other crucial references in front of me. Therefore, take what I say as tentative at the kindest. My recollection is that *nitcu* "normally" takes event descriptions in both places 2 and 3 and that other references -- to things -- occur in place 2 only with subject raising (tu'a?). In addition, "need" constructions are already special in English, since they often involve both raising and revealing the rest of the old buried sentence: in "I need a hammer to pound the nail" both objects come from "I pound the nail with a hammer" (more or less). So part of the solution here is divvying up the sources of the pieces. I suppose that "I don't need a lumberjack to pour my milk" (the first reading -- this is ambiguous, inevitably) is "I don't need a lumberjack for to pour my milk" against "I don't need for a lumberjack to pour my milk" = "I don't need that a lumberjack pour my milk in order that that my milk is poured" v "I don't need that a lumberjack pour my milk at all." That is, in the first the two object places are filled by the same event description, except that one has "lumberjack" as subject, the other has an indefinite subject (or is passivized or some such). The second reading is the normal one for "I don't need a dinosaur to eat me up," that is, this seems to be an event that is not needed for any purpose whatever -- one could go on to saying that it is rejected for all purposes (or its negated form is needed for every purpose). So, the second form has "A dinosaur eats me up" as the source for the second place and the third place is left unspecified (defaulting in negations in Lojban to internal particular?). This does not say squat about negations, but does sort out the cited cases a bit. In this context, the negation questions are probably going to be the often debated ones about scope. The "I don't need a hammer to attach these papers" case does have an easy answer, though I can't remember the vocab for it: "I need not a hammer ..." where the "not a" is a term negation that explicitly means "something other than." >|83 pc