Subject: Re: [lojban] no'a

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Aug 2001 00:18:16 -0400

At 07:31 PM 8/6/01 +0000, Jorge Llambias wrote:

>What do these mean?
>
>1- la djan ba klama lo zarci pu le nu la meris no'a
>
> A) John will go to some store before Mary goes to it.
> B) John will go to some store before Mary goes to one.
>
>2- la djan ba klama ro zarci pu le nu la meris no'a
>
> A) John will go to each store before Mary goes to it.
> B) John will go to every store before Mary goes to any.
>
>3- la djan ba klama le zdani be vo'a pu le nu la meris no'a
>
> A) John will go to his home before Mary goes there.
> B) John will go to his home before Mary goes to hers.

The answer to all these is "unspecified", because indeed we did not decide 
exactly what no'a meant when used as a selbri, but put it in the language 
for use in le no'a le se no'a etc. in parallel with le go'i and le se go'i 
as ways of dealing with the sumti anaphora problem.

Relatively little time was given to the question of predication anaphora 
being used to "reuse" the predicate, except in the case of go'i for 
agreement and disagreement.

My first inclination is therefore to recast the above in go'i like terms 
and ask what they mean, then use the parallel for no'a. Thus
>1- la djan ba klama lo zarci pu le nu la meris no'a

Means the same as
la djan ba klama lo zarci .ibabo la meris. go'i

and likewise for the other two.

I will beg answering your three questions in part because I think at least 
the "ro" question gets into quantificational issues, which we have all 
agreed I am less than competent to judge. In my opinion, the proper way to 
evaluate the sentence would be to a) use the parallel to go'i to judge how 
sumti are or are not copied by predicate anaphora, and b) export the 
quantifier to the prenex and using the indicated scope (which I think is 
long in this case) to determine the quantification of the ellipsized sumti 
in the anaphorized bridi. I'll let someone else say how this analysis 
actually comes out.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org