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A> This doesn't help me much, since I have understood {lo pa broda} to be, like the other {lo PA broda}, about a group with PA members (as your expansion suggests). {PA1 lo PA2 broda} is then PA1 distinct (not necessary separate) groups with PA2 members, eqquivalent to your {PA1 mupli be lo PA2 broda} (stretching {mupli} somewhat perhaps). To refer to, say, two of these guys requires something like {refe'iPA2 lo PA2 broda}, or — if their being in this group is not important — just {re broda} (but not, obviously, {re lo broda}), equivalent to your {re cmima be be lo PA2 broda}. So, to talk about a single individual, one has to say {pa broda}. You suggest that pierre is OK with your use of internal quantifers but wants the external to be used in the {cmima} sense. Presumably your external quantifer sense ({mupli}) would, for him be covered by {PA1lo broda PA2mei} — or maybe without the {lo}. Sounds like a Zipfean question; any ideas how to sort matters out?

B> I am not clear what part of a set is, even a singleton, so I suppose this is part of an individual, {PA broda} with fractional PA (a controversial point in its own right, if I remember rightly).

C> Ambigous: do you mean "takes as value individuals from the set of broda" or "for some individual broda, takes as values instances of that individual" I don't quite know what you might mean by an instance of an individual, so I suspect you mean the former. But that is not different from the first quantifier reading, so I don't understand the choice you are offering.

D> Again, I don't understand what the choice here is. What is a generic group (what more so that the/a group of broda)?

E> That is, I take it, that I am getting close to understanding what you have in mind. But I had just conmvinced myself that you werre after {lo2} and had made one small mistake. Now apparently you are after {lo3} with a few complexities. If {lo3} is made pervious to claims, then every sentence {lo broda cu brode} is three-way ambiguous (with a bunch of cases where the ambiguity disappers immediately and most others easily resolved by context): 1) the species broda falls under the genus brode, 2) the species broda overlaps the genus brode, or 3) specimens of broda do brode. Forms with explicit tense fall into the last category, of course. Contradictory claims ({lo broda cu ga brode ginai brode} fall into the second, as do claims that are otherwise impossible (though some of these may be of type 1 when there are no broda: {lo pavyseljirna cu xanri danlu}. {lo broda cu brode} does not generalize to {da brode}, since, in this line of talk, species are not things (we can shift
into species talk but it is much messier), nor even, in types 1 and 2, to {su'o broda cu brode}. I suspect that this is crucially different from your {lo} and so am no further along than I was.

Jorge Llambías <jjllambias2000@yahoo.com.ar> wrote:
pc:
> 1> I doubt that the most common group is a singleton; the most common is
> surely no group at all but just an individual. But then I suppose that is
> what you meant;

A>Yes, I meant {lo pa broda}, with the proposed {lo}.

> quantifying into a singleton would make sense, though on with
> {pa} — and fractionals.

That would be:

B>PA pagbu be lo pa broda

That's a possible use for fractional quantifiers, though not
my preferred one.

> I again would say that the most common thing would
> be to count individuals, which I assume is what you mean. But it does not
> seem to me that that helps at all with the question of internal quantifiers
> as group sizes, since the analogy is not very good.

I understand Pierre does not object to using internal quantifiers
as group sizes. He objects to the use of the external quantifiers to
quantify over instances rather than over members.

C>I guess {PA broda} can equally well be understood as quantifying
over members of the group of all broda, or over instances of
a single broda.

(Re:mupli & cmima)
> 2> Yes, but these are rather complex. The first has a short form and the
> second does not, but I suspect the second is more common — or at least as
> common — as the first.

D>I presented some examples with instances of groups. Perhaps if
someone presented some examples of members of (generic) groups
we could get a better idea of what we are comparing.

> 3> {lo2} does not behave like a constant, since it is not one (it is not
> tranparent to any operation). {lo3} does behave like a constant (since it is
> one) but is abstract and relatively impervious (as described so far) to
> factual properties (though that could be changed fairly easily at this
> point).

E>If lo3 could be made more pervious to factual properties, then
we may be converging.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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