Hi all,
I haven't really engaged with Lojban in years, but I recently had a few run-ins with things I like about Lojban, which prompted me with a question that I couldn't resolve myself, so I figured I'd ask.
I really like the fact that "noi" and "poi" are distinct and that there is no way to have a relative clause (or an appositive) that is ambiguous between restrictive and incidental. I then wondered if you could sneak that ambiguity into a tanru. I think the answer is yes: "lo mi xunre karce" could be either "lo mi karce poi xunre" or "lo mi karce noi xunre", right? After all, if "lo gerku zdani" is broad enough to be able to refer to a house that a dog once slept in, why not?
If that's the case, I wonder if tanru enable a particular kind of misleading language pattern I've recently been introduced to:
cat couplings. They leverage the ambiguity between a restrictive and non-restrictive sense of a compound phrase to presuppose a natural concept expressed by the phrase. The article has many examples in English; I'm going to go with "stupid American" (because it's easy to translate).
"mi bebna merpre .i ku'i co'e" implies "lo ka merpre bebna cu zasti" (i.e. that American stupidity exists as a concept).
Am I correct that the ambiguity in tanru allows this kind of sneaky implication just as in English? If not, why not?
Thanks.