Subject: Re: [lojban] As Kunsunlundz said... [was RE: RECORD:containers]

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 26 Jun 2000 13:21:28 -0400

[email-masked] wrote:

> So, after all the rhetoric against JCB for taking all predications without
> specific markers as merely potential,

He wanted to equate absence of markers with potential. We treat potential/actual
as one more set of optional markers, which can be defaulted appropriately just
like all the other markers.

> Well, at least this allows me to call a bottle a bottle even if it never does
> in fact have anything in it, because it is the sort of thing that in many
> worlds better run than this one would have something in it.

Just so.

> What I can
> presumably not say of my empty bottle is {ta ca botpi}.

Actually what is forbidden is "ta caca'oca'a botpi" = that thing is now, ongoingly,
in actual fact bottling something-unspecified.

> This seems a little
> odd, since when I say {ta botpi} I am probably NOT thinking of them worlds
> over there and then but of the bottle I have in my hand here and now, that is
> the untensed form is contextually focused to the present.

This is very predicate specific. When you say that something is a beverage,
you do not necessarily/typically mean that it is being drunk at this very
moment; you are quite happy with a potential interpretion. IOW, the
dispositional predicates like "soluble in water", "beverage", "heir" are not
treated as a special semantic class in Lojban.

Unexpressed tenses, like unexpressed arguments, are truly context-sensitive:
they are Humptydumptyisms that mean whatever we need them to mean at the
moment of utterance.

-- 

Schlingt dreifach einen Kreis um dies! || John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Schliesst euer Aug vor heiliger Schau, || http://www.reutershealth.com
Denn er genoss vom Honig-Tau, || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
Und trank die Milch vom Paradies. -- Coleridge (tr. Politzer)