Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 12:35 PM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

* Saturday, 2014-10-04 at 13:07 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
> Does it unwrap "li mo'e lo broda" in any way?

Only in that it parses the sumti, yielding
    broda(c0); [Fragment: [c0]]
    cy no broda .i li mo'e cy no te'u lo'o

Shouldn't "li mo'e cy no te'u lo'o" reduce to "cy no"? I guess "li mo'e sumti-6 te'u lo'o" has to be equivalent to "sumti-6", but I don't know what happens when a quantifier or a logical connective gets involved. Maybe "li mo'e ci ko'a" = "lo ci ko'a", and "li mo'e ko'a .e ko'e" = "ko'a jo'u ko'e".

> > > > Hmm. I've been adopting {lo broda} == {zo'e noi broda} as absolute
> > > > dogma, so it's really making a side-claim that the referent(s)
> > > > broda(s). You think a more accurate dogma would be
> > > > {lo broda} == {zo'e noi ca'e broda}?
> > > No, I was thinking of "ca'e" as defining the new auxiliary variables
> > > introduced by the parsing.
> > I wouldn't say it's a definition exactly. That it brodas need not be
> > enough to pick the referent out uniquely, so I don't see that we can
> > take it as a definition.
>
> I think it should be enough "in context".

Uhoh.

So if there are five contextually relevant apples, you would never
understand {lo plise goi ko'a} to be referring to just one of them?

How would I know which one? 

I may perhaps understand it as referring to them as if they were one, i.e. I could abstract away the different instances of Apple as I can abstract away the temporal dimension and consider all the different temporal instances as one, in cases where the different positions that Apple is taking are not relevant.

No description will ever be enough to pick the referent out uniquely in an absolute sense. The universe of discourse is not something that we have as a given, it's something that we have to construct and negotiate as the discourse proceeds. If you tell me that we already know for sure that the universe of discourse contains five things that satisfy "plise", then I would say that "lo pise" can only be "lo mu plise".

How about if, perhaps much later in the discourse, I clarified by saying
{ko'a pamei lo plise mumei}?

Then I guess "ko'a goi lo pa lo mu plise" would have been the way to assign one of them to "ko'a". The listener would still not be able to know which one if there are no additional clues as to which one the speaker means, so they would have to ask for more precision.

> I would say that whatever claim there is in "lo broda" has the same kind of
> illocutionary force that a claim hidden in "ta", "mi", "do", "ko'a", etc.

This is about presuppositions, isn't it?

So {broda lo brode} ->
    Presupposition: brode(c)
    broda(,c)

(This is ignoring for now what you mention above about the
brode(_) having to determine c.)

I think so, yes. 

Having a fully accurate way to render that in lojban, in the sense of
finding an utterance with that form but equivalent meaning to the
original, is probably too much to hope for (I don't think it's possible
in english, for example).

I agree, presuppositions are by definition not stated explicitly. If they are included as part of the discourse, they are no longer presuppositions. 

But I see that treating the presupposition as an editorial insertion *by
the translator* would make some sense. So although {sa'a cy brode .i
broda cy} would be a very odd thing to actually say, it could make sense
as a description of what a speaker means by {broda lo brode}. I guess
this is what you meant?

Something like that, yes. 

This does seem to be leading us to assigning subtly different meanings
to {lo broda} and {lo du noi broda}. Is that acceptable?

I don't see any other way. Maybe it's not always that important to distinguish a presupposition from a side comment, but if there is a distinction, then they wouldn't be identical.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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