Message-ID: <3471F709.4A16@locke.ccil.org> Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 15:14:01 -0500 From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Lojban List Subject: Re: veridicality in English References: <199711181946.OAA13880@locke.ccil.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1144 X-From-Space-Date: Tue Nov 18 15:14:01 1997 X-From-Space-Address: - la .and. cusku di'e > 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". 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. Likewise, if I say (with Paul Revere) "The British [persons] are coming!", this cannot be true unless it is the British who are coming. 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. 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"). -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban