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Re: [lojban] {le} in xorlo
Jorge Llambías, On 17/04/2010 19:09:
On Fri, Apr 16, 2010 at 9:48 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@gmail.com> wrote:
Also the distinction should pertain to "lo broda poi/noi" too.
"lo broda poi brode cu brodi" = "lo ge broda gi brode cu brodi"; "lo broda
noi brode cu brodi" = (roughly) "lo broda cu ge brode gi brodi".
"lo ge broda gi brode" is ungrammatical. "lo gu'e broda gu'i broda" is
grammatical but it's a tanru, which opens a different can of worms.
We can do "zo'e noi ke'a ge broda gi brode cu brodi",
I don't remember: can't "zo'e noi ke'a ge broda gi brode" or
"zo'e poi ke'a ge broda gi brode" be done with a gadri and a connective (gihek, hek, whatever)?
In your wine example, the
version with "it" is consistent with all three interpretations (generic,
specific, existential).
I can see how a linguistic construction can be semantically ambiguous
between these interpretations, but not how the interpretations can be
conflated into one.
Well, I can conflate the generic and specific interpretations into one
by invoking Mr Wine (which drives pc crazy): When Mr Wine does
something in a particular occasion, like being drank by me, then I
can shift the specificity from being focused on the wine to just apply
to the occasion and blur the two views. (Maybe we could call this the
referential interpretation.)
This is somewhat similar to saying that John was a once baby and now
has a beard. We have no problem in shifting from the John-as-a-whole
to the John-at-the-moment perspective. Granted we don't tend to think
that way about Mr Wine, and temporal occasions are not completely like
spatiotemporal occasions, and so on, but in principle I don't see a
problem from the logical side.
The existential interpretation I see as a different issue, as it is
tied to quantifiers. Maybe there's a way to conflate it too through
something like you do with the relative scope of the illocutionary
force, I'm not sure.
I agree. Generic and specific are conflatable; existential seems not to be. (Of course this doesn't mean the gadri can't simply be ambiguous.)
Some particular broda could be the generic
broda, you're saying. Our difference was mainly terminological.
But if you think "lo broda" means "some particular broda, which may be the
generic broda", then I see why you think you can do without e-gadri. (How to
explicitly do generics, though?)
Is there a way to explicitly do John-as-a-whole? The only way I can
think of is by explicitly using some predicate that suggests the
as-a-whole (or the generic) view, "John the whole person", "wine the
alcoholic beverage", "bus the means of transportation". But not
through a gadri, because there isn't just one level of genericity,
there are usually many different possible levels.
Setting the particulars of gadri aside, and thinking about (logical) language in general, generics would be the basic, primitive type, because they essentially involve identifying the referent by name (e.g. generic "wine" simply refers to the sense of "wine"). In principle there could be a generic gadri that simply points to the sense of the gadri's bridi-tail complement.
--And.
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