Re: [lojban] {zo'e} as close-scope existentially quantified plural variable

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 12:10 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
> * Saturday, 2011-09-10 at 10:43 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
>>
>> 1L: ro prenu cu se prami su'o tciuaua
>> 1E: Everyone is loved by some chihuahua.
>>
>> 2L: ro prenu cu se prami zo'e noi tciuaua
>> 2E: Everyone is loved by chihuauas.
>>
>> 3L: zo'e noi tciuaua cu prami ro prenu
>> 3E: Chihuahuas love everyone.
>>
>> 4L: su'o tciuaua cu prami ro prenu
>> 4E: Some chihuahua loves everyone.
>>
>> We also have two domains of discourse:
>>
>> D1 = {lo prenu ku xi pa, lo prenu ku xi re, lo prenu ku xi ci, .., lo
>> tciuaua ku xi pa, lo tciuaua ku xi re, ...}
>>      = {person_1, person_2, person_3, ...., chihuahua_1, chihuahua_2, ...}
>>
>> D2 = {lo prenu ku xi pa, lo prenu ku xi re, lo prenu ku xi ci, .., lo tciuaua}
>>      = {person_1, person_2, person_3, ...., chihuahuas}
>>
>> D1 and D2 are not the same domain. Sentences 1 and 4 "put us" in
>> domain D1, while sentences 2 and 3 "put us" is domain D2. By that I
>> mean that those are the natural domains in which to interpret those
>> sentences without any more context. Do we agree so far?
>
> Not entirely. I think 1E-4E could just as well be interpreted in the
> union D12 of D1 and D2 - because a sentence involving "some chihuahua"
> can't have the generic "chihuahuas" as an witness, and although
> (as in Carlson) a predication involving "chihuahuas" is ambiguous
> between being about the generic and about its
> manifestations/stages/whatever, that doesn't mean the domain of
> discourse has to be different for different interpretations.

The English situation is additionally complicated by the
singular/plural morphology. You say that "some chihuahua" can't have
chihuahuas as a witness, even when chihuahuas are in the domain of
discourse. But why is that? Is it because only chihuahuas can be a
witness, and chihuahuas are not chihuahuas? That can't be the reason
because chihuahuas are indeed chihuahuas. I think it has to do with
something like the witness has to satisfy "...is a chihuahua", and not
just "...are chihuahuas". So those two are different predicates in
English, at least when the domain of discourse is D12. In Lojban we
have to make do with "tciuaua" for both.

> You seem to be saying that D12 is an intrinsically unnatural domain for
> lojban. That seems to be a difference from english.

I'm saying a domain like D12 needs extra work. For example, instead of
a single predicate "tciuaua" we need two predicates, to go with the
English "... is a chihuahua" and "... are chihuahuas", which we would
have to use instead of the plain "tciuaua" to properly restrict the
quantifier.

> I think we agree:
> D1 |= 1L
> implies D2 |= 2L
> implies D2 |= 3L
> implies D2 |= 4L
>
> (where "D |= S" means "sentence S holds in domain of discourse D")

With the caveat that it would require some very strong context to
interpret 4L in D2.

> So there's no actual contradiction; it's just that if I claim 4L and you
> want to deduce something about D1 from it, you have two ways to proceed
> - you can (i) assume I'm claiming D1 |= 4L, or you can (ii) assume I'm
> claiming D2 |= 4L.

Right. One of my interpretations is bound to be wrong and without more
context, I would bet it would be (ii) that is wrong.

> By the above deduction, you can't deduce from (ii)
> more than D1 |= 1L. (In general, you won't even be able to deduce that
> much.)
>
> This is the (weak) sense in which there's an ambiguity of logical form.

And I don't see how this kind of ambiguity is avoidable, other than by
externally fixing one and only one domain of discourse for every
utterance. But then Lojban would cease being a normal human language.

> Now you say D2 is not a "natural domain" for 4L. That does sidestep
> this issue. It also makes determination of what is and what isn't
> a natural domain for a sentence a crucial part of the semantics of the
> language... do you think there's a coherent general theory of that (say
> for the small 'extensional' fragment of the language we've been
> mostly considering in these threads, which excludes tenses and NU and so
> on)?

If there is, we are very far from knowing it. But we do have some
rules of thumb, like the unlikelyhood of having kinds and their
manifestation present in the same domain without any predicate like
"x1 is an individual x2" being used, or the unlikelyhood of
quantifiers ranging over singleton domains.

> (In fact, I *would* like to claim that 1L logically implies 2L, because
> I would still like to analyse {zo'e} (but not {lo}) as in the subject
> line of this thread. But that's beside the point.)

So you would like to claim

D1 |= 1L
implies D1 |= 2L

and that D1 is a natural/preferred domain for 1L.

If that's how you want to analyse "zo'e", you still have to account
for the "obvious" as opposed to the "irrelevant" sense of "zo'e". As
in:

- xu do djica lo nu klama lo zarci
- u'u mi na kakne lo nu klama .i ei mi klama lo drata
"Do you want to come to the market?"
"Sorry, I can't go. I have to go somewhere else."

That should not come out as "I can't go anywhere."


> Do you know if there's anything in the formal semantics literature on
> this?

Nothing I can point to, but I'm far from knowledgeable on the subject.

mu'o mi'e xorxes
.

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