Re: [lojban] Re: tersmu 0.2

On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 12:54 AM, Martin Bays <mbays@sdf.org> wrote:

* Tuesday, 2014-11-04 at 20:23 -0300 - Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>:
>
> Doesn't (iii) always reduce to (i) though: pe [tag] ko'a = poi ke'a co'e
> [tag] ko'a?

CLL has it being less vague, though; e.g. {ko'a pe cu'u ko'e} is meant
to really be equivalent to {ko'a poi ko'e cusku ke'a}.

But doesn't that have to be inferred from context? If ko'a are expressions, then yes, "ko'a pe cu'u ko'e" will be understood as "ko'a poi ke'a cusku ko'e", but if ko'e are people, then surely it's more likely to be understood as "ko'a poi ke'a cusku fi ko'e". It may be that many tags have an underlying binary relation and so the natural inference is pretty straightforward, but I think in "ko'a pe [tag] ko'e" the tag only guarantees the role of ko'e, and the role of ko'a has to be inferred from the context.

> I think when the tag tags an event as sumti tcita. the relationship between
> (i) and (ii-a) is pretty straightforward:
>
> broda .i [tag] bo brode ~ broda [tag] lo nu brode (for non-tenses)
>
> broda .i [tag] bo brode ~ broda .i brode [tag] lo nu broda (for tenses)

Concentrating on this tense case:

I don't really see how this {lo nu} would end up working.

e.g. in CLL's {mi klama le zarci .i ba bo mi klama le zdani}, and
supposing the context is such that there's a specific event of
market-going involved, presumably that forbids a kind reading of {lo nu
mi klama le zarci}, and so it will have to be a plural - the
(contextually relevant) events of my going to the market, of which there
may be many spread over a large swathe of time. Am I then meant to be
claiming that my going home is after all such events? Or at least one?
Or "most" of them?

I would say that the seltcita sumti should specifically involve the
event(s) involved in the first connectand.

Yes, of course, that's what I meant. Change "lo nu broda" to "la'e di'u" if you prefer, or a more precise reference to the event described by the first "broda".

> And for non-tenses, by analogy I think it has to be
>
> broda .i [tag] bo brode ~ broda .i broda [tag] lo nu brode

Did you mean to have a {je} here, and for it to be different from the
expansion of {broda .i [tag] bo brode} you gave above?

I was speculating on what the second proposition would be when a logical connective is involved. Nothing really makes much sense though.

> > The only tricky bit is deciding what exactly the seltcita sumti of
> > the tag should be.
>
> "lo nu xu kau broda"., "the event of brodaing or not brodaing, whichever
> the case might be".

But which event(s)?

The one in question, the one used to evaluate the truth value of the proposition.

> Going back a bit, when someone says "carvi" they are not saying "there is
> some event of raining, x, and x happens". They may be saying "c is an event
> of raining and c happens", but not the first. If they were saying the
> first, there would be no way to negate the claim, because "na carvi" would
> be "there is some event of not raining, x, and x happens", which doesn't
> contradict the first claim, so "na carvi" would not be the way to negate
> "carvi".

But in a specific world at a specific time and position, it rains xor
not-rains, and in either case there's an event of raining / not-raining
enveloping that particular point. So "some event of not raining happens"
*is* equivalent, pointwise, to "no event of raining happens".

Are you saying that the domain over which "su'o" quantifies will be a singleton? In that case, using a quantifier is very confusing. If there's only one event of raining under consideration, then for someone to claim that at least one event of raining happens instead of saying that the one event of raining happens is just misleading.

In other words, we're meant to be within the scope of any quantifiers
over spacetime/worlds when we make the substitution {broda} <-> {su'o nu
broda cu fasnu}.

If the quantifiers over spacetime/worlds have left us with only one event to deal with, it makes little sense to quantify over the set of that single event.

I don't really know what {carvi} means - it depends on how exactly one is
meant to interpret this idea of "implicit tenses" - but I think that by
this argument it must be the same as whatever it is that {su'o nu carvi
cu fasnu} means.

I think it must be "lo nu carvi cu fasnu". It's not a claim that there is some event of raining that occurs (while any other events of raining are possibly not occurring). The speaker is just describing an event, not selecting it from many of its kind.

Usually this would be a pretty empty move to make,

I think quantification over singletons is not just a harmless empty move, it's a misleading move because it pushes us into a universe of discourse where the domain of quantification is not a singleton.

but I think it helps
with these connectives. {broda .i ba bo brode} <-> {da zo'u da nu broda
kei gi'e fasnu .i bo ba da brode}.

So e.g.
ca ro nu mi xagji kei mi klama lo zarci .e ba bo lo zdani
-> ca ro nu mi xagji kei da poi nu mi klama lo zarci zo'u ge da
fasnu gi ba da mi klama lo zdani

I don't have a problem with that quantification, because now we do have many nu klama lo zarci, so it does makes sense to quantify over them. But I think the second formulation is just a reasonable inference from the first rather than a direct logical entailment.

ca ro nu mi xagji kei ge ko'a goi lo nu mi klama lo zarci cu fasnu gi ba ko'a mi klama lo zdani

would work just as well, without introducing more events than were there in the original.

Even if that isn't the best way to formalise it, I feel sure that
something along these lines must be the right meaning, and that
ca ro nu mi xagji kei ge mi klama lo zarci gi ba lo nu mi klama lo
zarci kei mi klama lo zdani
is missing something crucial.

If you mean it's missing an explicit indication that the first and second "mi klama lo zarci" describe the same thing, I would agree. But I don't believe we need to impute to the original "ca ro nu mi xagji kei mi klama lo zarci .e ba bo lo zdani" a quantification over nu mi klama lo zarci (and presumably also another one over nu mi klama lo zdani, although you didn't make that one explicit) just to make that connection.

> Now, when A says "carvi", we may describe this as "there's some event of
> raining, x, and A says that x happens", but that's not the same as saying
> "A says that there's some event of raining, x, and x happens".
> So if by "quantifying over events" you mean that the speaker is quantifying
> over events, I don't see it.
>
> If you mean that you can interpret what the speaker is saying by
> quantifying over events, (i.e. the metalinguistic interpreter does the
> quantifying, not the speaker) then that may be,

I'm not sure I'm exactly saying either of these. I'm saying that {carvi}
is equivalent to {su'o nu carvi cu fasnu} in much the same way that it's
equivalent to {na na carvi} (although with a rather more complicated
logic involved). So what A says has the meaning of a quantification over
events.

I think if it's equivalent to something like that it would have to be equivalent to "lo nu carvi cu fasnu" rather than to "su'o nu carvi cu fasnu".

mu'o mi'e xorxes