* Wednesday, 2011-09-07 at 21:47 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 9:31 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
> > * Wednesday, 2011-09-07 at 20:31 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
> >>
> >> - xu do klama lo zarci
> [...]
> >> - ro ma'a klama
> >>
> >> "All of us go (there)", not "each of us go [somewhere]".
> >
> > Oh, really? Would you actually say that {ro ma'a klama} is false were
> > the destinations to be different?
>
> I was still thinking in terms of possible answers to "xu do klama lo
> zarci". In such a context, I would take the referents for "zo'e" in
> "ro ma'a klama [zo'e]" to be the same as for "lo zarci".
Ah. So in other contexts, {ro ma'a klama} could be true without the
destinations being the same for different referents of {ma'a}? But only
because you'd have the zo'e mean the generic "destinations"?
> >> "zo'e" is just like "mi", "do", "ti", "ta", "tu"... only much more
> >> open ended as to what referents it can pick up from the context of the
> >> utterance.
> >
> > There are scope issues, though... e.g. if you agree that {zo'e se fetsi
> > ro da poi mamta} is true (which maybe, given your examples above, you
> > actually don't), the zo'e has to scope inside the da.
>
> I agree that (without any more context to suggest otherwise) it's
> true, but you won't like my reason why, because it gives a generic
> referent to "zo'e".
You're right, I really don't like it.
If you introduce such generics, it seems that it becomes impossible to
unambigously specify order of quantifiers. This, surely, is a Very Bad
Thing.
I mean: you seem to be suggesting that for any broda(x,y) and any domain
of discourse M, there should be another plausible domain of discourse *M
extending M and an element *y \in *M such that
\forall x\in M. (\exists y\in M. broda(x,y) => broda(x,~y) ).
But then if I do say {su'o de ro da zo'u da broda de}, it could be that
I'm working in M and really mean to make the strong assertion
M satisfies \exists y. \forall x. broda(x,y) ,
or I could be working in *M and hence be claiming only
M satisfies \forall x. \exists y. broda(x,y) .
The only way to tell which I meant would be informal rules about saying
things in the least confusing way.
So no, I don't think such tricks should be resorted to unless absolutely
necessary - and if they do prove necessary, I'd think it a problem with
the language.
> > It sounds like you might be giving it longest scope rather than
> > shortest, which gets around that kind of issue... though it still has to
> > scope inside the da in {ro da zo'u broda zo'e noi brode da}.
>
> I don't give it any kind of scope, since I don't think constants have
> scope. But if you do need to force constants to be quantified, then
> yes, I would have to favour longest over shortest.
What's the alternative to scope?
I thought we agreed earlier today that zo'e isn't literally a constant
in general, e.g. it has to scope inside {da} in the above example.
Martin
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