On Tue, Feb 05, 2013 at 07:19:39PM -0800, John E Clifford wrote:
> I can't remember the names (even as vaguely as I remember Richard's)
> of Hans Kamp's stuff, but it would be a reliable place to go.
I'll look him up.
> The unreliable tends to be those that say that there are no opaque
> contexts "really" or try to deal with them without using alternate
> worlds or senses or their equivalents.
Although I tend to agree, this is clearly your judgement of a whole branch
of linguistic research. I wouldn't take it at face value.
> So the standard stuff either sets up a belief-world
agreed
> which differs from the starting UD
Don't you mix up belief worlds and universes of discourse here?
TTBOMK belief worlds are considered to be sets of propositions, whereas
universes of discourse are about keeping track of the individuals which are
the topic of the discourse.
> at least by having a non-null extension for "unicorn"
I agree in that this adds the sentence "unicorn(x)" to the belief-world.
I'm simply unsure about how to deal with x.
> or the whole thing is about the sense of "unicorn" and not about unicorns at all.
That's a problem of "ko'a believes that unicorns exist" imo.
It's really hard to argue for why "ko'a believes that one unicorn exists" should
be about intensional meaning, though people probably still try.
> Incidentally, a {lo/su'o pavyseljirna} in a {du'u} clause would never add unicorns
> to the starting UD (argument from the Stoics at least, if not earlier).
So the text {cy. krici lodu'u pa lo pavyseljirna goi ko'a se jirna re da .i ko'a cizra}
is semantically wrong in your opinion because there's no referent for {ko'a} around
in the second sentence? You said it's not in the main UD. I disagree.
(you could also just use {py. cizra})
v4hn
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