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Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2006 10:09:39 -0300
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From: "=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Jorge_Llamb=EDas?=" <lojban-out@lojban.org>
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Subject: [lojban] Re: A (rather long) discussion of {all}
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On 6/3/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
> So each predicate is marked for distributivity/non-distributivity
> (bunch-indiv/bunch-together)?

Each of a predicate's argument places _can_ be marked for it. It is
not always marked, in the same way that tense is not always marked.

> What is {lo tadni cu bebna} marked for?

It isn't marked, but it could be marked for distributivity.

> How about {lo tadni cu sruri
> lo skori}? What if they're playing tug-of-war? What if they're
> standing around a rope looking up at the person climbing it? What if
> several paths surround the building, and we're talking of them?

Indeed there are many situations that could be described by that
sentence. What if it's happening now? What if it happened two weeks
ago? etc. etc.

> No, "surrounded the building" is not inherently collective, and
> neither is any other selbri or sumti-slot.

Right. And "sumti-slot" is the right thing to say, because it is the
slot that should logically get the mark, not what fills the slot.

{dasni} is not inherently distributive either. For example in "the students
wore the hats", we would not normally want full distributivity for both
arguments, which would give "each of the students wears each of the
hats", we only want "respective" distributivity: "the students wore their
respective hats", "each student wore their own hat".

It's interesting to note that while Lojban has gadri corresponding to the
{joi}-connective, it has no gadri corresponding to the {fa'u}-connective, so
to get the "respectively" reading fully explicited you have to duplicate
the sentence:

 ro le tadni cu dasni pa le mapku ije ro re mapku cu se dasni pa le tadni

Of course {le tadni cu dasni le mapku} will be clear enough in most contexts,
because we know that hats are normally worn by one person only (at
a given time) and that a person normally wears just one hat, but that comes
from our general knowledge of how the world is, not from what the sentence
states.

> > There is no difference in the referring expression. The difference is in
> > the predicate.
>
> Predicates don't have default distributivity/non-distributivity.

I agree.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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