loi: quantitative claims

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

So now Jorge and I understand loi differently, as well as all the 
other gadri. Right now, I'm empathising with pc. :-(

But as far as loi is concerned, the official definition is: anything 
that can be predicated of an individual {lo broda} can be predicated 
of {loi broda}, and some extra claims (let's call them mass claims) 
can also be predicated of {loi broda}.

So {loi cinfo} lives in both Africa and Australia, because individuals do.

I don't see why quantitative and qualitative claims are different in 
this regard.

So, most {cipni} have two wings; very few have one. The mass claim 
of {cipni} is that {loi cipni} has zillions of wings. True. But the 
individual claim of having two wings also holds, no? So just as {loi 
cipni} lives both in Africa and Asia without contradiction, surely 
{loi cipni} has both two wings and a zillion wings without 
contradiction.

So I still think Mr Bird is {loi cipni}. Sometimes you might want to 
ignore mass claims of Mr Bird; the zillion wing mass statement is not 
pertinent, only the individual two wing and one wing claims. I'm not 
convinced you should all the time; Carlson's "kind" of entity (which 
is his Mr Bird, from which he derives generics) has the mass claim of 
extinctness or rarity, which you can only make of an entire 
population, not of individuals. And you would want to say that Mr 
Dodo is extinct, even though individual dodos were only ever either 
alive or dead.
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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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