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RE: [jboske] killing kau
cu'u la .and.
Xorxes has replied to Nick, who is beating his own path
through ground we have already traversed and found barren
(not a criticism of what Nick is doing -- I myself always
find that the best way to get where the pioneers are is
to find my own way there), but let me remind Nick that
it is perfectly possible to kill kau, thus:
du'u makau
du'au ce'u
{lo'i du'u makau} and {lo'i du'au ce'u} are equivalent;
they both are sets of propositional answers. The former
expression has the virtue of being established in usage;
the latter expression has the virtue of yielding a closer
and more compositional match between form and meaning.
OK, I found du'au (on the Google cache of the old wiki, since they're
both down); it took me ten minutes to understand it, and I just cannot
believe this is a primitive concept.
But let me make sure I understand the motivation for this. The
denotation of an indirect question, per Karttunen, is the set of all
true answers to the question. So for instance, the denotation of "who
killed Laura" is {"Bob killed Laura"}, of "what is in the fridge" is
{"cheese is in the fridge", "ham is in the fridge"}, and "who is richer
than Bill Gates" is {"noone is richer than Bill Gates"}.
Of course, indirect questions are intensional: so they have
denotations, but you need not know them (the answers) to speak of them.
Let's for the time being stick with {makau} and {du'u}. because I
really don't like {du'au}.
When you say 'I know who killed Laura", you're of course saying you
know "Bob killed Laura". So:
.i ma du'u makau catra la lauras
.i ledu'u la bab. catra la lauras cudu'u makau catra la lauras
.i lo'i du'u makau catra la lauras cu se cmima po'o ledu'u la bab.
catra la lauras
When you are curious about who killed Laura, you are curious about the
answers to the question "who killed Laura". That means that you are
curious about the sentence "Bob killed Laura", but without knowing it
yet.
When you claim that "who killed Laura" is important, you're making a
logical claim, and a discourse claim. The logical claim is that the
statement which happens to be the answer to the question "who killed
Laura" is important --- that is, "Bob killed Laura". You need to be
able to speak of the answer to the question, without knowing what it is.
.i vajni fa ledu'u makau catra la lauras.
.i vajni fa le danfu be lu ma catra la lauras li'u
.i vajni fa ledu'u la bab. catra la lauras.
The discourse claim is "Bob as opposed to anyone else killed Laura."
This is focus, and pragmatic information --- on what is more or less
important in a sentence. This isn't semantics, but information
organisation, and any attempt to moosh this in to {kau} is
illegitimate, as far as I'm concerned. That's what {bi'u} is for.
The claim "what I eat depends on what is in the fridge", as far as I
can tell, involves not only ma kau, but also jei and masses. So
lei jei da cu danfu lu mi citka ma li'u
cu se xlura le danfu be lu ma se vasru le lankytanxe li'u
ro da zo'u: leijei da du'u mi citka makau
ce se xlura le'i du'u makau se vasru le lankytanxe
So the truth of "I eat cheese" and "I eat ham", as a mass of
propositions in the general case (i.e. jointly), are determined by what
the denotation of "what's in the fridge is" --- mainly, by the contents
of the set {"cheese is in the fridge", "ham is in the fridge"}.
Is this it?
If this is it, are you sure my "million suns" outburst doesn't work?
That is, for all subsets of the universal set, I know whether the mass
of a given subset satisfies the claim. (Because a mass rather than an
individual may be the answer.) So in a universe consisting of entities
A B and C, I know the truth of all these claims, and which ones are
true, and the true ones are the denotation of the indirect question
"who killed C?"
0 did
A did
B did
C did
A and B jointly did
A and C jointly did
B and C jointly did
A B and C jointly did
--
Dr Nick Nicholas, nickn@unimelb.edu.au French/Italian,
http://www.opoudjis.net University of Melbourne
"There is a danger, my dear Neophron, that they will go further, and
conceive a contempt for the stress-accent as something very trivial,
and will decree that any group of words of any kind is a verse."
--- Maximos Planudes, predicting free verse and worse, late xiii AD.