Subject: Re: [jboske] Quantifiers, Existential Import, and all that stuff

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 6 Mar 2002 11:12:57 EST

In a message dated 3/6/2002 7:20:27 AM Central Standard Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> This comment is very strange. You're taking as evidence for your
> position something that is evidence against it. "Not all Klingons
> are bad" requires that there be Klingons (inside of ST) that are
> not bad. It is not "all" but "not all" that has existential
> import here!
> 

Read the whole exchange. The initiator was holding that universal 
affirmatives do not have existential import in logic but their negations do. 
But, he noted, ordinary language is different: the negations of a universal 
need not have existential import -- in the real world. I merely noted that, 
if you hold that, then the universal being negated does have existential 
import (which the initiator had denied). He gets into a contradiction, from 
which there are several escapes. To be sure, I prefer the one that allows 
importing universals.

<But {na'e ro} is not a grammatical quantifier.>

True, though hard to work through by hand. I have to get a working parser. 
Too bad, too, because it is less controversial than either {me'i ro} or {da'a 
su'o} . But {na'e bo ra} is too long to be a contender, I fear. What is 
{me'i} implicit number? Damn! {pa}

<A+ ro lo su'o broda cu brode
E+ no lo su'o broda cu brode
I+ su'o lo su'o broda cu brode
O+ me'iro lo su'o broda cu brode = da'asu'o lo su'o broda cu brode

A- ro lo [ro] broda cu brode
E- no lo [ro] broda cu brode
I- su'o lo [ro] broda cu brode
O- me'iro lo [ro] broda cu brod>

This works only if you believe -- as you have no grounds to do -- that {lo 
su'o broda} is more clearly existential than {lo ro broda}.

<I can't really believe that {su'o da poi broda} is I-, true
in the absence of broda, but if that works, so should {su'o
lo ro broda}. Same for O-.>

I have trouble with that one, too, and, since it has never turned up in 
anything I've looked at, just sorta let it slide. Technically it needs 
something like the {me'i ro} of O-, but I haven't come up with a good word 
for it: it seems to cover the entire range of possibilities -- which is 
probably why no one considers it much; {su'o no} is right but endlessly 
confusing. E+ is relatively useless as well, I suppose.
And, by the usual way, I don't see any - in {su'o lo ro broda} -- but you 
know that. So the rest of your discussion leaves me unimpressed and relying 
on the forms I suggested. In addition, {ro lo su'o broda} might not include 
all the broda, if you start playing that game, just some number of them (this 
is at least a justified as your notion that {ro} doesn't imply {su'o}).