Re: [lojban] As Kunsunlundz said... [was RE: RECORD:containers]

[John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>]

pycyn@aol.com wrote:

> So, after all the rhetoric against JCB for taking all predications without
> specific markers as merely potential,

He wanted to equate absence of markers with potential.  We treat potential/actual
as one more set of optional markers, which can be defaulted appropriately just
like all the other markers.

> Well, at least this allows me to call a bottle a bottle even if it never does
> in fact have anything in it, because it is the sort of thing that in many
> worlds better run than this one would have something in it.

Just so.

>  What I can
> presumably not say of my empty bottle is {ta ca botpi}.

Actually what is forbidden is "ta caca'oca'a botpi" = that thing is now, ongoingly,
in actual fact bottling something-unspecified.

>  This seems a little
> odd, since when I say {ta botpi} I am probably NOT thinking of them worlds
> over there and then but of the bottle I have in my hand here and now, that is
> the untensed form is contextually focused to the present.

This is very predicate specific.  When you say that something is a beverage,
you do not necessarily/typically mean that it is being drunk at this very
moment; you are quite happy with a potential interpretion.  IOW, the
dispositional predicates like "soluble in water", "beverage", "heir" are not
treated as a special semantic class in Lojban.

Unexpressed tenses, like unexpressed arguments, are truly context-sensitive:
they are Humptydumptyisms that mean whatever we need them to mean at the
moment of utterance.

-- 

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau,  || http://www.reutershealth.com
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau,           || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies.            -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)

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