Subject: RE: [lojban] space tenses

From: "Jorge Llambias" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 13 Aug 2002 17:54:22 +0000

la and cusku di'e

> > >{mi pu'o klama le zarci ca le nu mi citka}.
>
>I'm not 100% sure you read my gloss of 3 right. I meant it to be
>
>4 "It is about to become the case that when I eat I go to the shop",
>
>and not
>
>5 "When I eat, it is about to become the case that I go to the shop"
>
>Your further remarks seem to suggest that you think 1 means 5.

You're right! Tags should behave like na's in this
respect, so the ones directly on the selbri must have
widest scope. To get the 5 reading we have to re-order
them: {ca le nu mi citka kei pu'oku mi klama le zarci}.

>Part of the problem is
>that aspectuals shouldn't be handled by BAI; semantically, they
>don't fit.
>
>If "mi pu'o klama" = "mi pu'o zo'e klama" means "it is the runup
>to my going", "I am about to go", then it's hard to see what "zo'e"
>can sensically mean. You and pc seem to be saying that
>"mi pu'o ko'a klama" = "mi ca ko'a pu'o klama", but I don't see
>how that follows; it seems like an interpretation convention adopted
>so as to make your general tag equation work.

Yes, I tend to agree. An implicit {ca} seems like the least
tampering with the meaning.

>My own naive interpretation is that aspectuals are 1-place predicates
>when selbri tcita and 2-place predicates when sumti tcita.

I agree they have to be at least 2-place to make sense as sumti
tcita, yes. (Otherwise we get into weird cases like trying to
figure out how the event tagged by {fau} relates to the rest
of the arguments.)

>I don't want to try to persuade anybody to agree with me, partly
>because I haven't thought about the tense system much, and mainly
>because I feel that all the controversies over the tense system
>stem from handling tense by tags rather than by selbri.

I agree with you anyway. The second place of aspectuals I get
by adding a ca-place. So for example {co'a} as sumti tcita
corresponds to {cfari ca zo'e}.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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