* Saturday, 2011-11-26 at 22:58 -0600 - John E. Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>:
> On Nov 26, 2011, at 8:04 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
> > * Saturday, 2011-11-26 at 17:40 -0600 - John E. Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>:
> >> On Nov 26, 2011, at 12:29 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:
> >>> Since there's a single intended referent-bunch, {le broda} is invariant
> >>> under passing it through a negation.
> >>>
> >>> Obviously it isn't wholly immune to scope, because of the {ro da le
> >>> broda be da} issue.
> >>>
> >>> I don't see why it should be even when the description doesn't
> >>> explicitly mention bound variables; e.g. why {ro verba cu prami le
> >>> mamta} shouldn't be a reasonable abbreviation of {ro verba cu prami le
> >>> mamta be ri}, or why in {pu je ba ku mi'o jinga fi le bradi} we
> >>> should have {le bradi} getting the same referents both times.
> >>
> >> It is a linguistic precondition of the collapse of parallel sentences
> >> marked by {je}.
> >
> > I suppose it just seems odd to me that we don't allow the unfilled x2 of
> > mamta in {ro da poi verba cu prami le mamta} to refer to da.
>
> I would assume that (by a different process) the unfilled place their
> will be taken to be {da}.
But if it is, {le mamta} isn't constant with respect to {da}, as xorlo
(and, I thought, you) claim it must be.
Or you mean that this "different process" could be just contextual
guessing - {le mamta} is interpreted as a constant, presumably as the
constant bunch consisting of all mothers (or maybe of the kind Mother,
if that's different), but the reader reads more into the resulting prami
claims than is actually stated?
> But just what the process that gets to that is is unclear (surely, the
> {le} helps-- a clue from Basque again).
> >
> >>> xorlo seems to declare that it is constant in this way - unless I'm
> >>> misunderstanding again? (Just being hopeful...)
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> Anyway, {lo broda} just adds to {le broda} the side-claim that the
> >>> referents *actually* broda, rather than merely that I expect you to
> >>> think that they do (or otherwise understand me when I describe them as
> >>> brodaing). OK!
> >>
> >> And subtracts the specificity that the in mind provision gives.
> >
> > It does? How can it be non-specific and yet not involve quantification?
>
> I suppose all quantifiers are by nature non-specific, but the converse
> doesn't hold. The lions, who are mucking in my garden, are not very
> specific lions; I know them by their deeds, not as individuals or even
> as a herd. I don't, as the story has developed, even know how many
> they are or whether they are the same each night. I would presumably
> know these things about le cinfo.
OK. That's still specific in the sense I have been understanding the
term (and I would feel free to use {le} in such a case).
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