Collective: definition

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

(resend)

So I've spent the last hour fretting that Jordan was right, and 
collectives really are just {piroloi}. But with his insistence that 
{jo'u} is true even when the piano lifters work separately, I think 
I've finally worked out what a collective is.

-- Have you eaten all the rice?
-- Yeah, half last night, and half this morning.

That's the thing about masses, right? You can still chop them into 
parts. *Not* individuals; so "one of the band" proves you're not really 
massifying the band. But into handfuls of goo. "I stepped on some 
foliage." "How many leaves?" "What should I care? But I didn't step on 
the lot." Or (and this is an offensive example, but it's offensive 
precisely because it suppresses individuality, so I think it is 
instructive), "I met some pussy on the dancefloor" "Oh? how many women 
did you charm with your debonair manners?" "Man, what do I care? It was 
just some pussy." But our neanderthal does draw a distinction between 
"some pussy" and "all the pussy on the dancefloor." He will draw a 
distinction between being trampled to death by *some* outraged 'pussy', 
and *all* the outraged 'pussy'. What he is not doing is distinguishing 
between one and two women.

Now, when the outraged women in the danceclub band together to 
exterminate our neanderthal, he may very well reason that "all this 
pussy" is acting as a collective. So is {pi ro loi} the collective? It 
is, I think --- if you leave time out of it. Leaving time out is a 
time-honoured (heh) tradition in formal semantics: model-theoretical 
semantics does it all the time. And of course, it's wrong (which is 
specifically why Carlson had to invent kinds and stages [avatars] --- 
to deal with the difference between "John runs" and "John is running".)

What difference does time make? Well, the way Lojban tense is, if tense 
is unspecified,

mi viska re lo nanmu

can mean you see them at different times, since the default tense is 
not cazi da, but ca'o da: not a point event, but "at some time" within 
a larger, possibly infinite, duration.

Similarly, you can say

mi citka pi ro loi rismi

and mean half now and half later. Bzzt, your collective instantly 
evaporates. you've split the rice in two, you're not eating it all 
together at the same time.

So what's the collective reading about? pi ro is not enough; I don't 
want to allow you to say "half of John-and-James lifted the piano 
today, and the other half tomorrow." "Is it tense?", I says to myself. 
"An insistence on simultaneity?" After all, if we can say

cazi da mi viska re lo nanmu

and mean I see them as a group, then I could also say

cazi da pi ro lu'o la djan ce la djiemyz. cu bevri le pipno

and that way guarantee that John and James lift the same piano at the 
same time.

But just 'cause you see two things together, doesn't mean they're in 
cahoots together. They've also got to be in the same place. And with 
the same aim. And...

... hang on. Why am I allowing anyone to hold over the rice till 
tomorrow anyway? And why make joint action dependent on tense in the 
first place? The nature of a mass is that you can split it up, in time, 
or space, or intention, or whatever. The nature of a collective is that 
you cannot split it up; it is atomic.

So you can sensibly say

pimu lei re nanmu cu bevri le pipno ca la cibdei
.i je pimu lei re nanmu poi na bevri ca le cibdei
cu bevri ca le vondei
.i seni'ibo piro le nanmu cu bevri le pipno

But if you say

pimu lu'oi re nanmu cu bevri le pipno ca la cibdei...

then I say Stop. You can't split a collective up like that. They're 
either all lifting it together, or they're not a collective. And I 
shouldn't need tense to do it, because tense won't be enough in all 
cases. Nothing will be.

This means collectives, as indivisible n-tuples, are ontologically 
distinct from masses, and deserve their own *something*. I won't even 
insist on a distinct gadri; and I am happy Jordan pointed out {jo'u} is 
there, because that is indeed {jo'u}'s job. (And as should be clear, I 
think jo'u cannot be split in time or space, so I claim that indeed, if 
John then James lift the piano, it is not true that {la djan jo'u la 
djeimyz. bevri le pipno}. Jordan hesitantly started considering this 
possibility, I admit.)

But right now, I can't even see a gismu for the notion of 'collective'. 
And whatever the gadri is, I no longer think it's {pi ro loi}.

****

OK, now let me undermine my position.

When I say the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra is playing, who do I mean? 
(We're talking English now.)

Obviously not the second tuba player playing the kazoo. Obviously not a 
couple of wind players busking in their spare time.

Obviously not just the string players; when that happens, we say "the 
string section of the MSO", not "the MSO".

In fact we say the MSO is playing for a culture-specific set of 
criteria, bound up with the history of the orchestra. Basically, if a 
superset of what would count as an orchestra in 1750 is onstage, with 
maybe one or two bits missing, you'll call it the orchestra. So you 
have to have some strings and some winds. The rest is optional.

Lojban can't get into these culture-specific criteria for every single 
{bende}. So it treats {bende} as a lojbanmass. Strictly speaking, the 
guy with the kazoo *is* the lojbanmass of the MSO. It takes pragmatics 
to go from there to "at least a Haydn-size orchestra, plus or minus an 
instrument." And because this is culture-specific criteria, this has to 
stay a pragmatic matter.

The other thing lojbanmass gains in pragmatics is the fact that it is a 
bende --- a group of people that get together for a specific aim. When 
we say (in English) that the Beatles wrote the song, we mean not only 
that the lojbanmass of the Beatles did it, but that the lojbanmass is 
doing something consistent with the aims for with the Beatles were 
assembled, and with due authority to do so. If that obtains, we say 
'the Beatles' for the lojbanmass {pisu'o loi prenrbitlzi} --- even if 
it's just Lennon/McCartney. If that is not the case, then in English we 
would insist on all the Beatles being involved -- {piro loi 
prenrbitlzi}. So if the Beatles write a song, it can be just 
Lennon/McCartney writing a song. But if I kill the Beatles, it has to 
be all of them.

... or maybe not. This is murky, and not what we can or should solve 
now. The point is, that the semantics of a {bende} is complex enough 
(and that includes Nora's piano foreman}, that a lojbanmass is a good 
compromise. The nonveridicality thing was another such compromise for 
definiteness, although I think lamer.

So there's a definite place for lojbanmasses. In fact, a lot of what 
English would treat as collectives (to the extent it pays attention to 
the distinction at all) will turn out to be lojbanmasses, and it will 
be instructive to teach people the difference. But I think {jo'u} and 
{joi} are distinct for good reason, and we need to be able to reflect 
that distinction for bunches of stuff. Not even necessarily a gadri 
(although an extra LAhE will not kill you, for God's Sake). But at 
least something. In the current regime, there is nothing there to do 
it. Willing, in fact eager, to be corrected, but I'm not seeing it.

In conclusion: as a linguist, I luuurve Grice. I told my first year 
students that their pragmatics lecture was the most important lecture 
they would take with me. And a lot of my formalism is overcompensation 
for my mundane position, just as xod and I admitted to each other on 
the wiki once.

But we gotta have our possibility for disambiguation. That's the Lojban 
way. And right now, I sure would like a clear way of saying 
"together"...

There may well be an utterly obvious gismu I'm missing; if there is, 
I'll consider retracting my support of {lu'oi}, in the interests of 
fundamentalism. Ball's back in whoever's court.

--
How can the king and nobles makes ends meet, Dr Nick Nicholas,
if not by eating you and all the others? French & Italian,
(Cheetah to Ox; _Tale of the Quadrupeds_, Univ. of Melbourne
Byzantium, 14thC) nickn@unimelb.edu.au http://www.opoudjis.net


--
Dr Nick Nicholas, French & Italian, Uni. Melb. 
nickn@unimelb.edu.au
http://www.opoudjis.net
"Must I, then, be the only one to be beheaded now?" "Why, did you want
everybody to be beheaded for your consolation?" Epictetus, Discourses 
1.1.