RE: kau: instantiation

[Nick Nicholas <opoudjis@optushome.com.au>]

cu'u la .and.
> Nick:
> > I assume that {kau} always implies {djuno} or
> > something like that somewhere along the line,
> We had assembled a testcase corpus of non-djuno-based 'indirect
> questions'.

I'm very happy you did assemble these, because that's how the 
relevance of this discussion gets proven. That said, are all of these 
really that problematic? As you yourself admit, they needn't all take 
{kau}. So:

> What the last digit of my phone number is has changed.

Is this different from "the last digit of my phone number has 
changed"? I don't see how right now.

> What I eat depends on what's in the fridge.

i have a vague recollection that I saw this once, and that the 
question "isn't this just a headless relative clause" has already 
been raised. I think this one's got me: it's instantiation, and it's 
not clearly related to cognition (whereas Jorge's counterexamples of 
forgetting and deciding were.) So I can't immediately see how {djuno} 
resolves this. {kau} is intuitively appealing here; I don't know yet 
whether it's right. I'm fairly sure we can't cut the Gordian knot 
here, though, and say {le se citka be mi....} This isn't a claim 
about food, but about a particular instantiation of food fitting in a 
predication.

> John differs from Jane in how tall they are.

This is akin to "John exceeds Jane in how tall they are", which is 
resolved as {la djan. zmadu la djein. leni ce'u galte}. The problem 
then becomes, of course, what does {ni} mean; but we were going to 
have to resolve this anyway.

But your second example is giving me pause. You may have trapped me. 
Believe me, I'm looking forward to Karttunen's paper on questions.

****

A DEFENCE OF jboske and Formal semantics

I say this as much to convince myself as anyone else, because I find 
these debates frustrating, confusing, and bewildering.

But I feel I have to say this more explicitly, because xod's praise 
embarasses me a little. Just because egghead X says something holds 
in the semantics of English, doesn't mean we in Lojban have to buy 
into it. Remember, Carlson may have argued that all bare plurals in 
English, whether generic ("Dogs eat meat") or individuals ("I saw 
dogs"), are the same thing underlyingly; but Carlson's explaining 
English, so he would say that. He's got something to prove, after all.

It also doesn't mean that the formal semanticists are on the right 
track. Geoff Sampson wrote a sympathetic book review of CLL, as you 
may know (I'm getting someone to type it up for me and will send it 
to list, because people don't seem to know about it.) Well, Sampson 
also wrote a book I glimpsed today, trashing formal semantics so 
thoroughly, I was wondering what the hell I was doing being 
interested in it. Sort of like xod on a good day. :-)

But. But when we work with Lojban, we find some logical notions 
embedded in the language by its designers. They have a history and a 
context; it makes sense to find out what they are, to see if we need 
them and if they help in our understanding of What Lojban Shall Do. 
(This is, obviously, an open question.)

And clearly, And, Jorge and pc know a lot about this background. (And 
that the trade does have many an unresolved debate.) I don't. In 
fact, when I realised I didn't, and that I was speaking about Lojban 
semantics without knowing any formal semantics, I bowed out of 
Lojban. (OK, there was the small matter of my PhD too, but I realised 
I'd been talking crap, and I don't like talking crap.)

And yet this stuff is fun. When it stays clearcut, at least; before 
too long, though, you don't know whether you're coming or going. As 
we're all finding. It's fun on its own, even independent of Lojban; I 
always did want to learn it anyway.

(I have to say, though, falsifiable syllogisms are a delightful 
change to me, after several years of historical and literary 
reasoning that's full of hedges and maybes and probablys. It sucks 
following a train of thought for a couple of hours, only to realise 
that it can't possibly work; but it's also heartening, because 
disproof is instructive too.)

This doesn't mean Kartunnen holds the solution to all our {kau} 
problems. He may well not, especially if he's got some set-based 
Montague stuff that won't fit nicely into Lojban. But then again, he 
might. And even if he doesn't, it'll help me understand you guys, 
because you've obviously read it. (Nothing in Lojban tells you that 
an answer is a set of predications; that's formal semantics talking. 
And to my amusement, I see that Karttunnen says answers are a set of 
preds in 1977, and then Groenendijk & Stokhof in 1989 say no, surely 
answers must be individual constituents as well (just as xod did), 
and do some type-shifting (think tu'a) to make the logic work.)

This doesn't mean G&S and xod are in cahoots, or that they'd even go 
to the same clubs. But I do think it's illuminating to see how some 
linguists tackle these issues, and how some lojbanists tackle the 
same issues, and can we get anything useful out of the linguists. 
(And the logicians and the philosophers; one of the things Sampson 
trashed the formal semanticists about was that they were doing 
philosophy without talking to the philosophers.) Because Kartunnen 
wasn't necessarily right either. And since we're making all this 
stuff up, there's no 'right' anyway; there's just 'more elegant', 
'more learnable', and 'more consistent'.


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* Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian Studies nickn@unimelb.edu.au *
University of Melbourne, Australia http://www.opoudjis.net
* "Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity of locutional rendering, the *
circumscriptional appelations are excised." --- W. Mann & S. Thompson,
* _Rhetorical Structure Theory: A Theory of Text Organisation_, 1987. *
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