From colin@KINDNESS.DEMON.CO.UK Thu Jun 22 12:33:59 2000 Return-Path: Received: (qmail 23969 invoked from network); 22 Jun 2000 19:33:56 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 22 Jun 2000 19:33:56 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO anchor-post-32.mail.demon.net) (194.217.242.90) by mta3 with SMTP; 22 Jun 2000 19:33:56 -0000 Received: from kindness.demon.co.uk ([158.152.216.198] helo=arac) by anchor-post-32.mail.demon.net with smtp (Exim 2.12 #1) id 135Cja-000LR8-0W for lojban@egroups.com; Thu, 22 Jun 2000 20:33:55 +0100 To: Subject: RE: [lojban] Event abstractors Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2000 20:40:11 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2314.1300 Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <200006150036.IAA14542@fremantle.perth.ilink> From: "Colin Fine" -----Original Message----- From: Major [mailto:lojban@audry2.com] Sent: 15 June 2000 01:36 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: [lojban] Event abstractors As I understand it 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": 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? p-c has already answered the specific question, but I have another angle. What I think you're saying is that the two fragments describe the same state of affairs. In a sense this is true (though as pc pointed out, the event within the 'nu' may only be hypothetical). However, I think you're off-beam partly because you are thinking of these as DESCRIBING something. They don't. They assert something. la djan. cu pu cinba la maris. asserts that John kissed Mary. nu la djan. cu pu cinba la maris kei asserts that something unspecified is an event (state of affairs ...) that John have at some time in the past kissed Mary. These are not descriptions. In a sense it is true that NU ... KEI just packages up the sentence for embedding. But in exactly the same sense LE ... KU packs up a selbri for embedding. In both cases the meaning is changed in a rather specific and predictable way, but changed it is. **************************************************************************** **** Colin Fine "Don't just do something! Stand There" - from 'Behold the Spirit' workshop colin@kindness.demon.co.uk **************************************************************************** ****