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Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2
la'o me. Martin Bays .me cusku di'e
kukte fa lo plise .e su'a nai re lo ci plise noi vi zvati
OK, I think that does rule out \iota! If domain shifting were allowed
within a single proposition like that, we'd need to find a new way to
understand quantifiers, and the sky would generally fall in.
So maybe {lo} isn't quite \iota, but it's something like "\iota applied
to some ad-hoc but somehow natural subset of the extension"? If that
isn't to reduce to just "lo broda is something(s) satisfying broda",
this "natural" will have to be doing a lot of work... I don't have much
of an idea what it could be.
Possibly it can all be done by specifying the tense and aspect of
{broda}? With the kind reading corresponding to gnomic aspect?
I definitely think tense can do a lot of this (maybe even all of it)
while retaining maximality. For example, when there are two cats in the
room, one black and one white:
(1) lo mlatu cu xekri
would be false if {lo mlatu} had to include both cats (and xekri is
distributive), so one could consider it a misleading statement in that
context. However, it is still true that:
(2) lo mlatu vi xekri .i je lo mlatu va blabi
if we choose to read {lo mlatu} as Mr. Cat, while:
(3) lo vi mlatu cu xekri .i je lo va mlatu cu blabi
can be read easily as two different cats (satisfying the two different
predicates {vi mlatu} and {va mlatu}).
Therefore the original statement (1) could be saved by saying that {lo
mlatu} has implicit tense that restricts the cats we know to be in the
domain to those satisfying that implicit tense. How legitimate this is
as a general rule to use in real-life communication is another question,
but it would save certain usages of {lo} from being outlawed. Certainly
tense can be implicit anywhere else in the language, so it wouldn't be
strange at all for it to be implicit here, would it? (In misleading
cases, one should of course not leave tense up to context, but this,
too, applies throughout the language)
I have also used the gnomic aspect to describe the generic reading, but
we don't currently have a cmavo that indicates gnomic aspect. I have
proposed to redefine the underused {na'o} as gnomic aspect, but we can
use something else too.
mi'e la selpa'i mu'o
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