Re: [lojban] non-clausal ke'a

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

I was going to note that, in the expanded form, though not the original, another 
approach would be just to extent the scope of the 'da'. but again, the 'no' case 
rather cuts into that, and, indeed, reference back to a no case seems always to 
be peculiar -- or to point to the more general suggestion you make, which seems 
to cover all the possibilities (until we consider other quantifiers with 
overlapping scopes).



----- Original Message ----
From: Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sat, November 20, 2010 12:01:20 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] non-clausal ke'a

On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 2:40 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
> The other possibility, which also has some support in logic (or at least
> discourse analysis) would be that 'ri' picks up 'le su'o lo plise' or some 
such
> construction, which does not actually occur but refers to the right things,
> i.e., the apples on the table in this case.

Yes, that's what I meant by:

> In this particular case, you may say that it's obvious that "ri"
> should pick just those members of the domain of quantificationj that
> make "mi viska da" true, but if the context is slightly more complex,
> this won't always work.

The most obvious case where it doesn't work is when the quantifier is
"no" instead of "su'o", since "ri" can hardly be expected to pick up
"lo no lo plise". In:

  mi viska no lo plise .i ki'u bo ri se mipri
  "I saw none of the apples, because they were hidden."

I expect "ri" to pick "the apples", not "the none of the apples that I saw".

But that's not the only problematic case. If "su'o" is in turn within
the scope of some other quantifier, there can be trouble too.

I guess pragmatically it is inevitable that people will use "ri" and
such to point to "(lo) su'o..." even when there is no actual "lo" in
the antecedent, but I prefer the rule to be that "ri" looks for an
actual sumti, and any pragmatic deviation from that is just a
pragmatic deviation.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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