RE: [lojban] Event abstractors

["Colin Fine" <colin@KINDNESS.DEMON.CO.UK>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Major [mailto:lojban@audry2.com]
Sent: 15 June 2000 01:36
To: lojban@egroups.com
Subject: [lojban] Event abstractors


As I understand it

  la djan. cu pu cinba la maris.

describes "John kissed Mary". I don't understand how this is different
to describing "an event of John kissed Mary":

  nu la djan. cu pu cinba la maris. kei

except that it now has bracketing which will allow it to be embedded
into another bridi without syntactic ambiguity:

  le nu la djan. cu pu cinba la maris. kei cu vrude
  (that John kissed Mary is good)

Am I missing something which "nu" does to the semantics here or
does "nu ... kei" just package up the event for embedding?

p-c has already answered the specific question, but I have another angle.
What I think you're saying is that the two fragments describe the same state
of affairs. In a sense this is true (though as pc pointed out, the event
within the 'nu' may only be hypothetical). However, I think you're off-beam
partly because you are thinking of these as DESCRIBING something. They
don't. They assert something.
la djan. cu pu cinba la maris.
asserts that John kissed Mary.
nu la djan. cu pu cinba la maris kei
asserts that something unspecified is an event (state of affairs ...) that
John have at some time in the past kissed Mary. These are not descriptions.
In a sense it is true that NU ... KEI just packages up the sentence for
embedding. But in exactly the same sense LE ... KU packs up a selbri for
embedding. In both cases the meaning is changed in a rather specific and
predictable way, but changed it is.
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Colin Fine
"Don't just do something! Stand There" - from 'Behold the Spirit' workshop
colin@kindness.demon.co.uk
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