Re: Transparancy

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

 Gerald answers pc:

> GK> It seems to me that in both cases "someone" and "playing pool" are
> related as subject and predicate, or sumti and selbri.

That's one interpretation, but you can equally well say they are related
as term and attribue (eg smuti and seltanru)

> "I saw someone shooting pool" has two interpretions for me.
>
> 1. I saw a person, and that person was playing pool.
> 2. I saw an event, and that event was a person playing pool.
>
> For the lojban I am going to truncate playing_pool to playing [zo'e].
> I don't have a lot of confidence in bolga'a jubme.
>
> 1'. mi pu viska paboi prenu ije ri kelci
> 2'. mi pu viska lo nu paboi prenu cu kelci.
>
> The selbri viska takes an object or an event indifferently as the X2.
> I wish someone could explain the semantic difference in these sentences.
> They mean pretty much the same thing to me.

For one obvious difference, if I look through a window and see a pool
table and a ball being cued, but cannot see anything else in the room, I
suggest that it is true that

mi viska lo nu lo prenu cu kelcrpuli

but untrue that

mi viska lo prenu ije re kelci

(I am ignoring the 'pa' as irrelevant to this argument)

The English pretty clearly means the first, not the second.


> If I understand you correctly, you are saying that the 'prenu' in
> sentence 2' is opaque. Or rather that it should be opaque but isn't.
> Here again I feel it would not be opaque because it is a very clear
> identification. Identification means uniqueness, and hence transparency.
>
> I hope this makes sense to you, I am still somewhat diaphanous about
> transparency and opaqueness.


Me too, but I don't think it's anything to do with identification or
uniqueness.

1. mi pu viska paboi prenu ije ri kelci

is true iff I saw  one person and that person plays. From it I can validly
deduce
2. pa prenu cu kelci

Now,
3. mi pu viska le nu paboi prenu cu kelci

is true iff I saw happening the event of one person playing pool.

I have indicated above why 3. does not entail 1. The question of transparency
is whether 3. entails 2. or not. I incline to the view that 'viska' does
not create an opaque context and therefore that it does entail 2 (but
'jinvi' certainly would not, and I conjecture that nor would 'sanji'). But I
believe that this is what we are arguing about.

        Colin Fine