* Thursday, 2011-10-06 at 11:10 -0700 - John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>:
> Well, I am not sure just what the all the complications that MB and
> xorxes have stirred up are, but, so far as I can follow it, the
> position seems to be that {zo'e} stands for something I have in mind
> (or would have, if I thought about it). It is a constant (a different
> one at each occurrence -- an ongoing problem in Lojban), not
> a variable and not under any quantifier. Then {lo broda} is that with
> the additional information that the something is in some way, broda.
> So, it can refer to anything from a single broda to all brodas, past,
> present, future, and possible but not actualized. This referent can
> then be said to have a further property in a variety of ways, mainly
> to be grokked from context, since the ways to specify them are not ywr
> well-established. My understanding is that MB disagrees with this
> specification of {zo'e} and xorxes with the extrapolation to the
> referent, but juast why is hard to see.
Because it doesn't seem to explain the behaviour of {zo'e} with respect
to negation and quantifiers - at least if we accept that an unfilled
place is implicitly filled with a {zo'e}, and if we don't use kinds.
To dig out the old example, in
A: xu do pu klama lo zarci
B: mi na klama
, and assuming that there's only one market in question, B probably
intends to refer to that market by the implicit {zo'e} in {klama}'s x2.
But B is unlikely to mean only to mean that for some specific route,
B didn't go to the market by that route. B probably means that B didn't
go to the market via *any* route, or means of transport.
Your explanation of {zo'e} seems not to deal with that.
Martin
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