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Re: [lojban] [oz] {ny poi cy ke'a falcru}




On 8 February 2014 12:11, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:



On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 11:34 PM, Felipe Gonçalves Assis <felipeg.assis@gmail.com> wrote:

It turns out we would arrive at exactly the same conclusions from your reasoning. The topic of this thread is one of the few examples in which a conflict appears.

Right. The only situation in which the two approaches will differ seems to be when "poi" is attached to a sumti that already has its referents determined beforehand. Then when the poi-clause is a proper restriction on those referents, it will be fine with the poi-as-restriction approach, but it will fail with the poi-as-referent-determiner approach. But then what is the advantage of this second approach? When both approaches work, they mean the same thing, and when they don't mean the same thing, it's because the second approach breaks down, not because it has an alternative use.


Firstly, my approach doesn't limit _expression_, as I already pointed with {lo me ko'a}. Secondly, you do gain a lot, only you have to go into the realm of pragmatics in order to appreciate it.

When I say {ti poi toldi}, I am making it clear what I am pointing to, while when I say {ti noi toldi}, I expect you to understand what I am pointing to, and I am giving the information that it is a butterfly. In the latter case, I might be presuming, for example, that you don't know that the colourful thing I am pointing at is in fact a butterfly. In the former, the information in the relative clause has a clear purpose: it is there to clarify the reference.

These pragmatic markings are useful to manage the so called Common Ground, which is to say that it helps one to keep track of what the other knows (about what one knows, etc.). If it were obvious to you that what I was pointing at was a butterfly, and there was no apparent reason for me to remark that, {ti noi toldi} would be a pragmatic failure, triggering some response from you that could help us re-establish the Common Ground. {ti poi toldi}, on the other hand, would be fine.

Under the alternative convention, this distinction can't be made: when I point at a definite thing, only {noi} makes sense.

mu'o
mi'e .asiz.

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