Subject: Well, at least it won't get in my crotch

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 2 May 2000 18:40:07 EDT

xorxes: 
<>
pc: 
And I took it to be a reply to my question about how to understand an
observative in this context, namely that thepredication was to apply to the
earlier cited sentence (well, utterance, in fact): Rhetorical question had
been the idea (of using {paunaixu}).
I tend to take the whole exchange as an argument for not dropping x1-- in
these kinds of exchanges anyhow,where there are often several applicable
anaphora (not that 'a recent remark' or the like helps much).

xorxes:
<<Isn't the grammatical/semantical notion of modification
a kind of {nu galfi}? If not, what should we use for it?>>
pc:
Well, I suggested {ve skicu} in this case, but that was only on the fly. 
What gets modified in grammatical modification? In the clearest cases,
tanru, it is the referent of the modified to the referent of the complex and I
guess that can be generalized for subject predicate modification (from the
referent of the subject to a truth value or event involving that referent) and
so on. But I think there must be a more natural word that {galfi} to deal
with these relations in Lojban in Lojban.
pc:
I still have some of the intensional notion of the perfective in my mind, so 
when I read the {ba'o} I took it to mean (once i had figured out what the 
rest of the sentence was about) that that was the idea when it was written 
and that the effect of that idea persisted, in aprticular that the intension 
was that I (and other readers) take it that way. (It is BTW rather clever -- 
if we are to mark rhetorical questions, always -- like sarcasm -- a problem).