On 6/2/06, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:
On 6/2/06, Maxim Katcharov <maxim.katcharov@gmail.com> wrote:
> > {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.
In "the 26 students surround the building" how many things are such that they *actually* surround the building? Note the difference between "playing a role in the surroundment" and "*actually* surrounding". No one of the 26 actually surrounds it, and it's not that "in one view they surround it, in another they don't". You can't say "Zoe surrounds the building". No one of the 26 actually surrounds it. So what surrounds the building? Well, to be sure, it's a "surrounder of the building" that surrounds it. What is it? A crowd? A mass? A group? Doesn't matter. Really, it doesn't have to be anything more than "a surrounder of the building" that is composed in some way of 26 students. But that's enough. And it's one thing, or at the very least something *different* from 26 students seen individually (as they would be seen if they were wearing hats, for example). There is only one thing. There are not 26 that fit that description. Just because you do not see in your mind a *crowd* surrounding a building does not mean that one entity (probably a crowd) does not surround it.