Date: Wed, 19 Nov 1997 04:24:27 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199711190924.EAA11349@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: And Rosta Sender: Lojban list From: And Rosta Organization: University of Central Lancashire Subject: Re: veridicality in English X-To: LOJBAN@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1734 X-From-Space-Date: Wed Nov 19 04:24:30 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU John: > > I don't accept these as counterexamples. "Veridical/nonveridical" > > do not mean "true/false". They mean "asserted (by the speaker) > > to be true/false". > > I use the term "veridical description" to mean "a description > whose truthful applicability to its referent is *essential* to the > truth-claim of the surrounding sentence". Yes. This is a clear version of what I should have said. > Either "the" or "a" can prefix a veridical description in > English. If I say "There's a horse in that field", this cannot > be true unless the referent really is a horse. I agree. > Likewise, if I say > (with Paul Revere) "The British [persons] are coming!", this cannot be > true unless it is the British who are coming. I believe this is a misreport of the facts of English. Some weeks ago I discussed an example (taken from McCawley): "the man standing over there drinking a martini" - here I'm not claiming that he's drinking a martini; I'm just describing him to help you identify who I'm talking about. Hence THE is nonveridical. > Likewise, the use of "a" to indicate a new referent can override > any default veridicality. The narrative use of "A man went to the > store yesterday" does not require that the referent really is a man. ? I don't see what you mean. > Rather, I take the traditional view: "the"/"a" do not encode > specificity or veridicality except by accident. What they primarily > encode is definiteness (defined as "listener knows what's meant"). Yes, they do primarily encode definiteness, but the weight of evidence suggests that THE also happens to be nonveridical. I haven't checked whether this is so of other determiners too, but I ould expect it to be true of all definites. --And