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Re: [lojban] Speaker specificity: {.i da'i na vajni}





On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 9:12 PM, mukti <shunpiker@gmail.com> wrote:

Some languages do not mark a distinction between referents a speaker has in mind. Others only mark it in special situations. Spanish, for example, makes a distinction in noun phrases with relative clauses:

"Me voy a casar con una mujer que tiene mucho dinero." (specific)   

Suppose the context is that there are two women with a lot of money, and I know that I'm going to marry one of them, but I still don't know which one. Then that sentence is still correct, but is it specific?

"Me voy a casar con una mujer que tenga mucho dinero." (non-specific)

A bit more far fetched, but suppose there is a woman that I know I'm going to marry. She doesn't have a lot of money yet, but she probably will at some point, and I won't marry her until she does. Is it non-specific? (Arguably still yes, but the non-specificity is among versions of the same woman rather than among different women.)
 

Without a relative clause, however the distinction is unmarked: 

"Me voy a casar con una mujer." (may be specific or non-specific)

(Note: My Spanish is limited and I owe this example to "A New Reference Grammar of Modern Spanish".)

A similar distinction is made in English: 

"I intend to buy a car." (may be specific or non-specific)

And then either: "It's cheap and has low mileage." (disambiguated as specific)


Suppose the context is that there are ten cars in the parking lot, all of them cheap and with low mileage, and I have decided that I'm going to buy one of them, although I haven't decided which one yet. Is it disambiguated as specific? 

Or: "It should be cheap and have low mileage." (disambiguated as non-specific)

Suppose there is a certain car I intend to buy, but I still don't know whether it's cheap and has low mileage or not, but as far as I know it should. Is it non-specific?
 

In both English and Spanish, it is the non-specific case that is marked.


Is that because the indicative mood is less marked than the subjunctive/should-mood? I think these are better treated as indications of specificity rather than as marks as such, since they can be overridden by context. A more definite mark for specificity is "certain" in English, or "cierto/a" in Spanish: "Me voy a casar con cierta mujer", "I intend to buy certain car". (Or "this" in a more informal register: "there's this car I intend to buy.")

The English definite article, "the", often discussed in relation with specificity, subordinates the consideration of whether the speaker has referents in mind to the question of whether the referents are identifiable in context. 

"I want to rob a bank." (may be specific or non specific)

Here the indefinite article ("a") indicates that, regardless of the speaker's state of mind, context is not sufficient to disambiguate the reference: There may not be an obvious referent, or there may be more than one.

It could have (at least three levels of specificity:

"I want to rob certain bank." (completely specific)
"I want to rob any of certain banks." 
"I want to rob any bank." (completely non specific) 
 
The one in the middle may apply when I don't have any specific bank in mind, but I do have some restrictions in mind that the bank should fulfill. 

It seems to me that reason that {le} is not often used is that the distinctions it bears have not, over the course of the last ten years, proven useful to speakers (and writers and translators) most of the time. If the distinction of speaker-oriented specificity were important, for example, and if the neglect of {le} were merely a matter of conformism, I would expect to see more locutions like:

{mi djica lo nu terve'u lo karce poi mi nau pensi tu'a ke'a}  

I'm interested in knowing what other people think about all of this. (But less interested, perhaps, in whether or not they're currently thinking about it.)

The main reason I stopped using "le" is that I never knew when it was supposed to be used. I would spend an inordinately long time trying to decide each time I had to use a gadri which one to use, I was never completely satisfied that I had made the right choice, and in the end it didn't seem to make much difference anyway. So I abandoned "le" at least until I have a clear idea of how it's supposed to work.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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