Re: [jboske] Quantifiers, Existential Import, and all that stuff

[pycyn@aol.com]

In a message dated 3/6/2002 7:20:27 AM Central Standard Time, jjllambias@hotmail.com writes:

This comment is very strange. You're taking as evidence for your
position something that is evidence against it. "Not all Klingons
are bad" requires that there be Klingons (inside of ST) that are
not bad. It is not "all" but "not all" that has existential
import here!

Read the whole exchange.  The initiator was holding that universal affirmatives do not have existential import in logic but their negations do.  But, he noted, ordinary language is different: the negations of a universal need not have existential import -- in the real world.  I merely noted that, if you hold that, then the universal being negated does have existential import (which the initiator had denied).  He gets into a contradiction, from which there are several escapes.  To be sure, I prefer the one that allows importing universals.

<But {na'e ro} is not a grammatical quantifier.>

True, though hard to work through by hand. I have to get a working parser. Too bad, too, because it is less controversial than either {me'i ro} or {da'a su'o} .  But {na'e bo ra} is too long to be a contender, I fear. What is {me'i} implicit number? Damn! {pa}

<A+  ro lo su'o broda cu brode
E+  no lo su'o broda cu brode
I+  su'o lo su'o broda cu brode
O+  me'iro lo su'o broda cu brode = da'asu'o lo su'o broda cu brode

A- ro lo [ro] broda cu brode
E- no lo [ro] broda cu brode
I- su'o lo [ro] broda cu brode
O- me'iro lo [ro] broda cu brod>

This works only if you believe  -- as you have no grounds to do -- that {lo su'o broda} is more clearly existential than {lo ro broda}.

<I can't really believe that {su'o da poi broda} is I-, true
in the absence of broda, but if that works, so should {su'o
lo ro broda}. Same for O-.>

I have trouble with that one, too, and, since it has never turned up in anything I've looked at, just sorta let it slide.  Technically it needs something like the {me'i ro} of O-, but I haven't come up with a good word for it: it seems to cover the entire range of possibilities -- which is probably why no one considers it much; {su'o no} is right but endlessly confusing.  E+ is relatively useless as well, I suppose.
And, by the usual way,  I don't see any - in {su'o lo ro broda} -- but you know that.  So the rest of your discussion leaves me unimpressed and relying on the forms I suggested.  In addition, {ro lo su'o broda} might not include all the broda, if you start playing that game, just some number of them (this is at least a justified as your notion that {ro} doesn't imply {su'o}).