Re: TECH: Transparency / Opaqueness

[Jorge Llambias <jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU>]

la veion cusku di'e

>   (a)     I'll read two books. [any two]
>   (b)     I'll read two books, this and that.
>
> ((a) is the opaque case and (b) the transparent one)

Comment: Future tense is tricky for this. The truth value is
timeless, and therefore to evaluate it you have the advantage
of seeing all time at once. Even though (a) looks opaque, it
really isn't, you just have to look in the future and see if
the claim holds for two books, that are not "any" from this
timeless perspective.

The truly opaque "I read any two books" (tense is irrelevant) is
mindboggling.

> Now I'm wondering what would happen, if we said in
> general that {le} is used for transparency and {lo}
> for opaqueness.

It doesn't work. For most predicates, the "opaque" claim is
pretty useless.

>     I think that even generally it
>     might be useful to define an outer quantifier of the {le}
>     descriptor to include an elidable {lo ro}.

It's already like that.

Notice that {pa le cukta} is non-specific. You can't have a
specific reference with any quantification but ro.
Thus {le pa le cukta} is specific again.


Jorge