Apposed participials

[Colin Fine <C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK>]

pc says:

>              OTOH some expressions in English contain event-referring
>         expressions but seem to be transparent: " I saw someone shooting
>         pool," for example.  This pretty clearly does imply that there is
>         someone that I saw shooting pool.  Indeed, if it could be shown
>         that there was no one shooting pool in my visual range, I would
>         have withdraw my original claim, falling back to "I thought I
>         saw..." or "It looked like ..." or whatever.  But notice that
>         the basic claim is not exactly the classic English form of an
>         event-referring expression, a "that"-clause or an infinitive. "I
>         saw that someone was shooting pool" does seem to be opaque,
>         approximately equivalent to "came to know ... by seeing" and so
>         inheriting the opacity of "know," failing to export when I could
>         not identify the player -- presumably by sight. Thus, we might
>         argue that the object of "see" in the transparent case is not the
>         event but rather just the subject, to which the event-reference
>         is somehow attached.  That is, it may be that the analysis of "I
>         saw someone playing pool" is not "I saw (someone playing pool)"
>         but "I saw someone (playing pool)", which would both account for
>         the transparency and fit in with our general notion that the
>         object of seeing is an object not (generally) an event.  That
>         leaves the question of how the "someone" and the "playing pool"
>         are to be linked together, for it is not just that the someone
>         was in fact playing pool but that I saw him doing it, so there is
>         an event-referring expression here after all, though perhaps
>         subordinately.  None of the obvious suggestions in Lojban (e.g.
>         _poi_ or _noi_) seems quite right.  Comments and suggestions
>         welcomed eagerly.
>         pc>|83
>

I have a very strong intuition that it is not the event which is the object
of the seeing here. But as pc says the event is still part of the object.

In many cases we can actually express it as

mi viska da ca le nu da kelcrpuli
'I saw x at the time x plays-pool'

and I have a suspicion that expressions of this sort will always work,
but I'm not sure (they may not necessarily be temporal, but deciding
whether a temporal, spatial or other relation is appropriate will be
an example of the familiar process of being more precise when we translate
into Lojban. And we can always leave it vague with "va'o" or even "do'e".

pei

Colin