Robin's gadri Proposal
On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 08:25:51AM -0700, Jorge Llamb?as wrote:
> > Is {lo noda} really grammatical?
>
> Yep.
>
> > What does it mean, spelled out in detail?
>
> I would say something like "that which is nothing". An odd thing indeed.
It seems that it should be considered either a contradiction, or a completely
meaningless accident of grammar.
Using CLL's {lo}, {lo noda} = {su'o lo no da}, and you can't have {su'o lo no}
of anything.
In xorlo, it seems to be "a 0-some of {da}", but then {da} doesn't work that
way - the {no} is the quantifier of how many {da} there are. (If this weren't
the case, any claim involving {noda} would be vacuously true.) It seems that
xorlo leaves the LE PA KOhA combination quite undefined.
You can't put the {noda} in the prenex, because then you'd get something like
{lo noda broda} = {noda zo'u lo da broda}, which aside from sounding like Dr.
Seuss, is ungrammatical. So this might mean that {lo noda} (or {lo pada} or
whatever) is only grammatical by accident, since the {no} looks like an inner
quantifier to {lo}, but it's not really one.
--
Rob Speer