Wiki page BPFK Section: Epistemology sumtcita changed
wrote:
> While I don't suppose there is any good
> systematic way to say what can occupy a place
> in
> a predicate there does seem to be a general
> notion that sumti in places stand for
> components
> of event being described. Some sumtcita
> expressions seem not to meet this condition:
> while the cause of a event may be seen as a
> component of the event, who knows about it or
> who
> has described it does not. These seem rather to
> adverbial to the main bridi, adjectival to one
> of
> the other places, or to suggest that the
> surface
> structure of the claim is inside out the
> logical
> claim (the brivla of the added place is the
> main
> brivla and the apparent main clause is shoved
> into some subordinate role). The
> epistemological
> sumtcita seem particularly to fall into this
> category , so that I wonder whether
> incorporating
> the "added place" locution is really all that
> informative. Perhaps just saying that they add
> information to the basic claim and then selling
> out the nature of that information in each case
> would be more elegant (and accurate).
>
On later thought, it seems to be less the "added
place" that is the heart of the problem Ithough
it still plays a role) and more a problem with
connecting the sumtcita to a selbri in some
literal or transformational sense. If we take
the related predicate as merely a useful (and
hopefully not too misleading) mnemonic device
then many of the problems arising so far
disappear. We don't have to find some rule for
what various modified forms means as functions of
the underlying predicate, we don't have to deal
with any number of never used forms presented
because they are possible for the predicate. To
be sure, we now have to define each tag
individually, without rule gooverned relation to
the predicate. But the rules are working very
well anyhow, so that most cases need some side
comments to make the connection at all: where is
the main sentences in all of this, how, exactly,
is the connection - to the selbri, to an
argument, to the bridi as a whole, and so on.
There are enough cases that clearly do not work
in the paraphrase mode to make it fairly clear
that the mention of predicates with the tags was
originally intended (as CLL actually says
somewhere, I recall) as an aide memoire not a
transformation guide. Thus, for example,
{ri'anai} just means something that is generally
in the area of negations and causation, in which
area "despite" is the most likely to be useful,
simpler ones being rarely used or just plain muddled.