Re: metonymy

["Robert J. Chassell" <bob@GNU.AI.MIT.EDU>]

   On the subject of metonymy: unless this is built in to the grammar,
   it is a matter of pragmatics, and if it is a matter of pragmatics
   it isn't, strictly speaking, pertinent to a debate on the semantic
   component of the grammar.

Depends what you mean by `built in'.  In as much as Lojban has {noi}
and {poi} to specify referents to sumti, most of what you say most of
the time in Lojban is a short form for what you could say more
specifically in some grammatically correct longer form.  It is the
same in a natural language such as English, except the minimal
specifiers are different.

English uses a bunch of terms, `a', `the', `some', `any', plus plural
and singular, as its minimal specifiers.

    I need a box.
    I need the box.

Lojban also uses a bunch of such terms, but their meanings are
different from English.  The categories for short forms are different.
Most peculiarly, Lojban has a term indicating truth, `that which
really is', as well as one meaning `that which I designate'.

    mi nitcu lo tanxe
    mi nitcu le tanxe

In neither English nor Lojban do the terms *necessarily* specify the
box, although they may.

The presumption in English is that a listener is helped if he or she
is told whether the needed box is `the' box, or `a' box.

The presumption in Lojban is that a listener is helped if he, she or it
is told whether the needed box is `for-real', or something else that I
might be designating as a box in my mind, or a mathematical set of
boxes.

The minimal specifiers of the two languages are different.  We often
translate `lo' into English `a', and `le' into `the', but such
translations are not very accurate.  Better to say `that which really
is' and `that which I designate as' for `lo' and `le'.

A future research topic might be: does a fluent thinker in Lojban
unconsciously find more things that `might be designated as boxes, but
are not really boxes' than a person who is fluent only in English?

--

    Robert J. Chassell               bob@gnu.ai.mit.edu
    25 Rattlesnake Mountain Road     bob@grackle.stockbridge.ma.us
    Stockbridge, MA 01262-0693 USA   (413) 298-4725