On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 11:26:00AM -0500, Ian Johnson wrote:
> For example, it is sensible to consider a universe of discourse
> in which all the concrete objects exist in this universe.
strange, but ok
> Consider such a discourse, and suppose John
> believes (incorrectly ru'a) that unicorns exist.
still ok
> {la djan [srera] krici lo du'u da pavyseljirna gi'e zasti} is completely fine.
sure
> {la djan [srera] krici lo du'u lo pavyseljirna cu zasti} is slightly weirder,
> since now {lo pavyseljirna} should actually have a referent in the universe of discourse,
Why should that be weird? The reference will create a new referent in the UD
in my opinion. You can't keep the UD fixed anyway.
> but we can wave our hands a little and allow for du'u-scope to induce
> little universes of their own.
No, we can't, because this kind of stupid reasoning creates the monkey sentence paradox
and other problems as you've mentioned below.
> {lo pavyseljirna cu [srera] jai se krici la djan fai lo ka ce'u zasti}
> (something like "unicorns are believed by John to exist") is far more troubling,
> because now there's really no syntactic excuse for {lo pavyseljirna} not being
> in the universe of discourse.
doi la latro'a joi la .John. do'u
Please point me to some linguistic literature on the kind of universe of discourse
you are using in these discussions. Papers are fine.
It seems I disagree with the assumptions you make about them and we're
running around in circles without a real basis.
mi'e la .van. mu'o
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