On Tue, May 21, 2013 at 9:39 PM, selpa'i
<sel...@gmx.de> wrote:
We know that na(ku), quantifiers, connectives and tenses are bridi operators, but what about non-tense tags? Some clearly are bridi operators, for instance the causals:
In general, tags for which the rest of the bridi is an argument of the tag's underlying selbri would be bridi operators. Those are also the easiest tags to come up with a clean definition for. Maybe all tags have to be defined that way.
Either we make every tag, no matter what selma'o it belongs to, a bridi operator, or we pick some that are operators and some that aren't depending on what is the most useful / easiest to use. The problem with the second option is that it is a bit annoying to have to memorize which tags are and which aren't bridi operators. On the other hand, the problem with the first option is that it would actually invalidate a lot of usage! For example, from The Little Prince:
(4) do pu djuno noda fi'o fuzme mi
The intended meaning is (more or less) "It's my fault that you didn't know." However, if {fi'o fuzme} is treated like any other tag, then the scope is wrong and the sentence suddenly means "In the past, there was no thing such that: you know it because of me", which is backwards from the intended meaning.
Yes, it should have been "fi'o fuzme mi do pu djuno no da".