| In a message dated 7/28/2001 7:14:11 PM Central Daylight Time,
jjllambias@hotmail.com writes: >I must have misunderstood. I glorked that the idea was that "ci da poi Also, I'm not sure I buy the argument that natlangs do it that way. The closest English for the above is "three people love two", I think I would have said "Three people love two of themselves" which is not quite the same, requiring all three to love the same two (and Oh, let us not get back into THAT discussion!). But I may be wrong, since I don't think I have ever really used this device (see earlier posting). <Similarly you can say things like "some species of elephant are native to Africa, some to Asia and none to America", where obviously the second "some" and the "none" are restricted to "species of elephant", not to the first "some species of elephant".> But would you really (and why) use the same variable for all three of these, just changing the quantifiers? <To get the other meaning we need a way of referring collectively to several previous referents, and we need this for other (somehow related) cases, such as this: "John met Mary at the bar and then they went to the store." How do we do that "they", which refers to two sumti in two different places? We don't have any pro-sumti for that kind of thing. I ran into this problem several times in the Alice translation. The way I handled it was using {le remei}, {le cimei}, an so on. So: la djan penmi la meris le barja ibabo le remei cu klama le zarci Something similar can be done with the "three people love two of them" case: ci da poi prenu cu prami re lu'a le cimei and similarly: ci nanmu cu nerkla le barja i re le cimei cu klama le barjyjbu i pa le remei cu cpedu lo'e ladru> This seems to me a much more serious problem (handily provided with at least the start of a solution) than the treatment of an anomolous quantifier case (which is pretty weird the other way of treating it as well, especially without explicit scope rules). |