RE: [jboske] Needed boxes (was: lo'ie != lo'ei)

["And Rosta" <a.rosta@lycos.co.uk>]

Lojbab:
> At 02:23 PM 12/31/02 -0500, Invent Yourself wrote:
> >On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Jorge Llambias wrote:
> > > We don't want to force people to claim a particular value exists,
> > > of course. That's why da is wrong and that's why I use lo'e
> > > there 
> >
> >Does it make sense to want or need things that don't exist? It could be
> >said that the sentence takes the speaker to an imaginary world where the
> >item exists; it's hypothetical anyway, so why be fussy about truth values?
> 
> That is why I suggested da'i-marking 

It's not so much a hang-up about existence as a way of capturing
logically distinct readings. Consider something like "This could start
a fire": this doesn't claim that there is a fire, but that is
a by-product of the fact that "a fire" is within the scope of
"could" -- it belongs to a subordinate bridi, not to the main
bridi. We see exactly analogous ambiguities with "need", except
here we don't have such an obvious way of getting the quantification
into a subordinate bridi.

--And.