Subject: Context Leapers

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 27 Sep 2002 13:28:39 EDT

Since a use for them has come up again, perhaps it is time to mention them 
again and set people to checking -- again- whether is not already a device of 
a place for a device to carry out their function, which is getting 
quantifiers (and connectives, too -- but this is generally easier) in the 
right order, with the right scope, regardless of where they turn up in the 
stream of utterance.
The usual example in English is "any," which, when it occurs in the 
antecedent of a conditional of the scope of a negation (which, come to that, 
the antecedent is) leaps out to take long scope (the whole conditional, the 
negation) as a universal. The problem with this is that "any" can also mean 
"some" and "some" and "a" behave in much the same way (indeed, in Pierce's 
existential graphs, a universal conditional is regular drawn with a 
particular in the antecedent): "I any boy comes to the dance, all the girls 
will dance with him" = "... some boy ...." = "... a boy..." (the fact that 
the quantified expression is picked up in the consequent is not significant, 
since the move works when this is not so). A better case would be "a 
certain" which comes out of negative contexts as a particular: "If a certain 
boy comes, all the girls will dance with him" or "all the girls will be 
happy." And this move clearly does not depend upon some interplay of 
particulars and universals, since "a certain" is particular throughout. [& 
would probably have this as {le} so presuppositional and so a quantifier 
alrady in front even before the speech act was defined. At least that the 
quantifier is before the basics of the sentence, e.g., the negation, if any, 
is certainly right.]
What would be wanted in Lojban is a widget to attach to a quantifier that 
places it at the front of its context with maximum scope or can insert it 
into a string of quantifiers at some place other than where it physically 
lies. It may already be around, hidden away where the index to CLL does not 
go (While looking for this, I found examples I have long been looking for of 
{ka} used not as {du'u ce'u} but as the parallel to {ni} in 14.19.1&2 (365), 
a section on connectives! Not mentioned in the index.)
Otherwise, maybe something in subscripts, which don't now work?