[lojban] Re: xorlo and the expansion of bridi

[Roman Naumann <roman_naumann@fastmail.fm>]

Thanks for your reply.

Jorge Llambías wrote:
> (BTW, what does "B dogs exist" mean to you exactly? Is that the number
> of dogs alive at the time of the utterance, the number of dogs that
> have ever existed or will exist on this planet, or something else,
> depending on the context?)

I'm not sure what it means, I just remember the 'old' lo implied 
existential claims.

> > expanded to
> > {B da poi gerku ku'o A da vasxu}.
> > Where A and B are PA.
> >
> > Is the (without-xorlo-)expansion correct?
>
> No, you have "B da poi gerku ku'o" as the x1 of vasxu, and "A da" as
> the x2. Also, binding the same variable twice doesn't make much sense.

Sorry, I forgot the prenex.
What I meant to say was: {B da poi gerku zo'u A da vasxu}
But still, I don't see why you say the variable is being bound twice.
According to the example from CLL:16, it should be locally requantified 
instead of being bound again:

( 14.1)    ci da poi mlatu cu blaci .ije re da cu barda
    Three Xs which-are cats are white, and two Xs are big.

What does Example 14.1 mean? The appearance of ``ci da'' quantifies 
``da'' as referring to three things, which are restricted by the 
relative clause to be cats. When ``re da'' appears later, it refers to 
two of the those three things --- there is no saying which ones. Further 
uses of ``da'' alone, if there were any, would refer once more to the 
three cats, so the requantification of ``da'' is purely local. )

Now, if {B da poi gerku zo'u A da vasxu} is the correct expansion of
{A lo B gerku cu vasxu}, does that change with xorlo?

> > How does {A lo B gerku cu vasxu} expand with xorlo?
>  (...)
> Or we could put everything in one bridi as:
>
> A da poi me lo gerku noi klani li B cu vasxu
> A of the dogs, which are B in all, breath.

I should have been more specific about what kind of expansion I had in 
mind. The thing I'm looking for is a canonical form of {A lo B <sumti> 
cu broda} with a proper prenex. That canonical form should not contain {lo}.
(Something a computer could use for doing some logic on it)

> But this is not exactly about xorlo, at least not about "lo". This is
> how quantifiers work in general. An outer quantifier on any sumti
> works the same way:
>
> A <sumti> cu broda
> = A da poi me <sumti> cu broda
> A of the referents of <sumti> are broda.

Isn't A an _inner_ quantifier here? Without xorlo, there should be {ro} 
as an implicit outer quantifier.


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