On Fri, Mar 08, 2013 at 01:58:13PM +0100, selpa'i wrote:
> la selpa'i cu cusku di'e
> >[snip]
>
> I accidently hit send, here is the rest:
>
> The attributive use at the bottom of my last post does not make a
> claim about an identified object, since we don't know who murdered
> Smith, just that that person must have been crazy to murder Smith.
> {lo} there is rather better than {le}.
>
> The referential use: "For example, suppose that Jones has been
> charged with Smith's murder and has been placed on trial. Imagine
> that there is a discussion of Jones's odd behavior at his trial. We
> might sum up our impression of his behavior by saying, "Smith's
> murderer is insane." If someone asks to whom we are referring, by
> using this description, the answer here is "Jones." This, I shall
> say, is a referential use of the definite description."
>
> Here, one could make an argument for {le}, the speaker knows the
> real-world object ("Jones"), and by using {le} they can try to make
> this explicit, but again, {lo} doesn't seem any worse here,
---
> especially since it's so obvious who the murderer is in this
> situation.
---
That is no supporting argument at all. It completely misses the point.
In this case the utterance _doesn't care_ about whether or not Jones
is the murderer and works without asserting that Jones is a murderer.
This can be beautifully modelled with {le} in my opinion.
{lo} on the other hand will assert that, if you link the referent of the
{lo}-expression to Jones. It might assert it in this special context,
but it will _always_ assert it.
> Overall, these distinctions don't seem very interesting in Lojban.
I disagree. I think this distinction models {le} vs {lo} quite accurately,
even though the distinction between referential and attributive use
is not very clean in NatLangs(or at least in the ones I know).
mi'e la .van. mu'o
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