[lojban] Re: mi kakne lo bajra

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Well, of course, all the technical terminology of Lojban is cover for ordinary 
terms in logic and linguistics.  And we do have "metaphor", left over from JCB, 
and probably a few others.  "Raising" actually seems to be one we got pretty 
much right.
The problem at hand is to deal with raising as a grammatical operation, without 
ruining a valid inference.  If I can raise "a unicorn" from "I want to ride a 
unicorn" to (for explicitness)  "There is a unicorn I want to ride".  The 
grammar is unobjectionable, but the corresponding inference is invalid.  Part of 


what was originally built into the notion of "a logical language" was that 
grammatical transformation should all be valid inferences, and by and large, 
Loglan and Lojban have adhered to that.  But not here, if the transformation is 
allowed.  The problem is that, in the standard theory (as vague as that may be),
mentioning a unicorn in a proposition (or whatever) does not put unicorns in the 


domain of discourse (but in some other peripheral domain, reachable by various 
nefarious means), while mentioning a unicorn outside such secondary contexts 
does,  So, the grammatical raising also moves a referent from some remote domain 


to the current one, without all the nefarious means,  Inferences don't expand 
the universe of discourse.  xorxes would solve this by having the unicorn added 
as soon as it appears, pretty much regardless of context, so that the unicorn 
was already in with the utterance of the first sentence.  This blocks off some 
reasonable responses and doesn't solve all the problems involved, so is 
ultimately not acceptable.  But he has held to it (in various forms and by 
various dodges -- see the history of 'lo') -- for, gee, it seems like decades,


----- Original Message ----
From: Pierre Abbat <phma@phma.optus.nu>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sat, October 30, 2010 3:17:51 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: mi kakne lo bajra

On Saturday 30 October 2010 10:27:45 Jorge Llambías wrote:
> "Raising" is a term from linguistics that, like so many other terms
> from linguistics, is often misapplied in Lojban. If you really want to
> know what "raising" is, this is a good place to start:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_(linguistics)

What are the others, and how should Lojban be discussed in proper linguistic 
terms? I'm aware of "modal", which in the Book denotes a preposition derived 
from a selbri (i.e., a proper preposition; "do'e", which is not derived from 
a brivla, means "fi'o co'e", so it still qualifies), and in linguistics 
denotes words like "ka'e".

Pierre
-- 
Don't buy a French car in Holland. It may be a citroen.

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