From cowan@ccil.org Wed Jun 14 19:10:52 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 23009 invoked from network); 15 Jun 2000 02:10:50 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m3.onelist.org with QMQP; 15 Jun 2000 02:10:50 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO locke.ccil.org) (192.190.237.102) by mta1 with SMTP; 15 Jun 2000 02:10:50 -0000 Received: from localhost (cowan@localhost) by locke.ccil.org (8.8.5/8.8.5) with SMTP id WAA24612; Wed, 14 Jun 2000 22:40:03 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 14 Jun 2000 22:40:03 -0400 (EDT) To: Major Cc: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Event abstractors In-Reply-To: <200006150036.IAA14542@fremantle.perth.ilink> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII X-eGroups-From: John Cowan From: John Cowan On Thu, 15 Jun 2000, Major wrote: > > As I understand it > > [1] la djan. cu pu cinba la maris. > > describes "John kissed Mary". I don't understand how this is different > to describing "an event of John kissed Mary": > > [2] nu la djan. cu pu cinba la maris. kei > > except that it now has bracketing which will allow it to be embedded > into another bridi without syntactic ambiguity: > > le nu la djan. cu pu cinba la maris. kei cu vrude > (that John kissed Mary is good) > > Am I missing something which "nu" does to the semantics here or > does "nu ... kei" just package up the event for embedding? It abstracts away from the notion of "claim": your example 1 *asserts* that John kissed Mary, whereas example 2 merely refers to some event, actual or possible or hypothetical, of John kissing Mary. -- John Cowan cowan@ccil.org "You need a change: try Canada" "You need a change: try China" --fortune cookies opened by a couple that I know