On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 10:49 AM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:
>
> I've given you one plausible interpretation, that l is an ever leftmost
> quantifier that picks out a bunch of items and sticks with thm throughout
> its scope. It does the trick and is a familiar feature of natural
> languages. There are problems with it, xorxes insists, and so it may need
> some work, but it is not obviously crippled from the getgo.
The minor problem I find there is, as I mentioned before, when the
restriction contains a free variable. For example:
ra vrba le mmteka cnbake
Each child, their mother, they kissed her.
"Each of the children kissed their mother."
You would need to introduce some kind of lambda term for l- to be
moved to the left, but I doubt we will disagree much about any of
that. I would just say that "ra P le Q" is equivalent to "le Q ra P"
as long as Q does not contain "a" as a free variable and be done with
that.
The unsurmountable disagreement will come however when we consider
what items are available for l- to pick, or indeed whether there is
some predetermined set of items from which it must pick. For example,
I would allow l- to pick whatever it needs to pick for:
la ma djni le crbe mncake
"John is fascinated by bears."
to work as desired, while I suspect you may not be happy with l-
picking bears in general.
ma'a xrxe