Re: pa remna, quantifiers

[jorge@phyast.pitt.edu]

> >> Well, you *can* say that pa remna has one head, two arms, two legs.
> >
> >You can say anything you want, but if you say that you are saying
> >something that is not true, since more than exactly one human have that
> >number of members.  (Unless you want to argue that you mean at a certain
> >time, in a certain place, but I don't think that's fair.)
>
> This bothers me.  I haven't thought it out thoroughly, but perhaps it is
> desireable to have "pa remna" = "pa lo remna" be a subselection from
> remna which makes no claim about other members of remna.

That's what {su'opa} is for, isn't it? You are saying that you want
numbers to behave as in English and not be the exact number but a lower
limit.

> This would be
> a distinct difference from having "lo remna" = "da poi remna".

I don't understand this conclusion.

> >I thought {re prenu} was to be interpreted as:  "There exists an x that
> >is a person and there exists a y that is a person and x is not equal to
> >y:"  and whatever was claimed was claimed for x and for y.
> >
> >But I think And's interpretation is better:  "There is a set of two
> >persons, such that for every x of that set:"  whatever.
>
> This sounds exactly like "ro lo re prenu".

No, because that says that there are only two persons in the Universe.

> And yet, somehow I think you
> are intending to say what I said above.  That "re prenu" identifies a
> set of two people out of all who are people, and makes a claim only
> about those two.

No, that would be {su'ore prenu}.

> >I couldn't find a single example with more than one general quantifier
> >in the reference grammar, so I don't know if there really is a policy on
> >this.  My impresion was that they were supposed to be generalized
> >existentials, but I may well be wrong.  I better let John answer.
>
> Even if we had a policy, it would have had to be rethought in the face
> of the "any" issue and the issue quantification scope of implicit
> "su'opa", since I suspect the quantification issues of those you call
> the non-general ones impact those of the general ones.  If order does
> not matter for su'o and ro quantifiers on "lo" then order doesn't matter
> for the general quantifiers either.

Order does matter and a lot for {su'o} and {ro}, and also for the
more general ones.

Order doesn't matter only: (a) if the quantifier of every argument is {ro}
                           (b) if the quantifier of every argument is {su'o}

as soon as you have some combination of those, you can't change the order
without changing the meaning.

Also, order does not matter for singular references, which can be thought
of as having either of {ro} or {su'o} for this purpose.

> I wonder if the question you raise is made fuzzy by the use of
> fuzzy numbers.  How do we compare:
>
>                ci remna cu se tuple re tuple
>                3 people have 2 legs?
>
> vs.
>
>                re tuple cu tuple ci remna
>                2 legs are legs for 3 people?

With the interpretation And and I like those mean:

                ci remna cu se tuple re tuple
                There are three (and only three) men, each of whom
                has two (and only two) legs.

                re tuple cu tuple ci remna
                There are two (and only two) legs, each of which
                belegs three (and only three) men.

With the other interpretation, they both mean the same thing:
"There are exactly three men and exactly two legs, such that the men
are belegged by the legs (each man by each leg)".

They are all nonsense anyway, because there are more than three men
with two legs.

Jorge