WikiDiscuss

WikiDiscuss


Robin's gadri Proposal

posts: 1912

Rob Speer:
> On Fri, Aug 06, 2004 at 08:25:51AM -0700, Jorge Llamb?as wrote:
> > > Is {lo noda} really grammatical?
> > > 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.

I wouldn't take away from the Sartres of this world the possibility of
talking about Nothing as if it were something, though, even if it is not
very meaningful to our first-order logical mind.

> Using CLL's {lo}, {lo noda} = {su'o lo no da}, and you can't have {su'o lo
> no} of anything.

BTW, what would you take {su'o lo ci da} to be in CLL? Does it
imply/presuppose that there are three and only three things in the world?

> 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.

Yes, I was aware of that. I'm thinking of defining it as {LE PA me KOhA},
now that I have a definition for me. Then {lo noda} is {lo no me da}.
But the problem is that we don't have as yet a definition for bare {da},
at least in XS, where sticking a {su'o} there won't do.

> 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.

Certainly not. In XS you never take quantifiers from inside {lo} to the
outside! That's crucial. (Neither in CLL, for that matter, I think.)

> 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.

CLL says:

A full theory of sumti-based descriptions has yet to be worked out. One common
case, however, is well understood. Compare the following:

9.1) re do cu nanmu
Two-of you are-men.

9.2) le re do cu nanmu
The two-of you are men.

Example 9.1 simply specifies that of the group of listeners, size unknown, two
are men. Example 9.2, which has the sumti-based description ``le re do'', says
that of the two listeners, all (the implicit outer quantifier ``ro'') are men.
So in effect the inner quantifier ``re'' gives the number of individuals which
the inner sumti ``do'' refers to.


This seems to agree with defining {le re do} as {le re me do}.

mu'o mi'e xorxes




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