Re: [lojban] Re: A (rather long) discussion of {all}

["Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On 6/2/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:

> > {lo su'u tadni} is not something that can surround buildings or carry
> > pianos or wear hats.
>
> Why not? It can be *anything* that context suggests might be appropriate

It's a relationship abstraction. {su'u} takes a full bridi and
converts it into a
selbri. {su'u tadni} means {su'u zo'e tadni zo'e}, it does not select the x1 of
tadni, the students, but the relationship between students and subject
of study. That relationship is not the kind of thing that surrounds buildings
or wears hats.

> > Not that I know what it is, but it's something
> > along the lines of "studying", like {lo nu tadni}, {lo ka tadni}, or
> > {lo du'u tadni},
>
> If it was something along the lines of those other abstracters, you'd
> use them instead.

I don't use {su'u} because I don't really know what it means, but I do
know some things it cannot mean, and selecting students in any kind
of groupings is one of those things.

> > {le tadni} has 26 referents. This is independent of what you then predicate
> > about them.
>
> Ok, your {le tadni} *might* have 26 referents, or it might have 1 (a
> surrounder of the building), we don't know which and must decide based
> on context.

No, my {le re xa tadni} *always* has 26 referents, including when you
predicate something non-distributive like "surround the building" of them.
It never has one referent. The inner {rexa} indicates explicitly that it has
26 referents.

> "the students surround the building and wear hats"
>
> The same thing that surrounds the building wears hats?

No. The same thing*s* that surround the building wear hats.
The plural is important there.

> The same each things that wear hats each surround the building?

("Each things" is not standard English. "Each" takes a singular noun.)

"Wear hats" is predicated distributively, and "surround the building" is
predicated non-distributively, of the very same things, the students.


> > No, in both cases it is only the 50 students that get referred, nothing else.
>
> 50 students get *mentioned*, but there is something that is implicitly
> referred to when you say "50 students surround the building".

Not under the pluralist take, no. There is no implicit or explicit reference
to any encompassing entity. That's the defining feature of the pluralist
view.

mu'o mi'e xorxes