Date: Tue, 18 Nov 1997 15:49:22 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199711182049.PAA16992@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: John Cowan Sender: Lojban list From: John Cowan Organization: Lojban Peripheral Subject: Re: veridicality in English X-To: Lojban List To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 1181 X-From-Space-Date: Tue Nov 18 15:49:39 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU 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