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Re: [engelang] discourse-scoped existental quantifier



On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 9:36 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
>
> As I wrote in the other thread:
>
> > There's a slightly different quantifier that I'd been meaning to
> > mention, but have kept on forgetting. It's an existential quantifer
> > with scope over the whole discourse:
> >
> > "Once upon a time, there was a poor woodcutter. He lived in a hut
> > with his dutiful daughter."
> >
> > In Livagian I treat it as a separate quantifier in its own right.
> > (Livagian doesn't have Xorban's lV.)
>
> How to do this in Xorban? Just "la [poor]a [woodcutter]a"? -- No, tthat's
> "The poor are woodcutters"? Maybe "sa
> [hereby-newly-introduced-into-discourse]a je [poor]a [woodcutter]a"?

There seem to be two issues here: how to introduce it, and how to
carry it over to other sentences. For the first part, I don't see any
problem with plain s-:

la je drna cdra se je pnde mdrktne cbneka
Distant era-A, some-E poor(E) & woodcutter(E): at(E,A)

Now as long as you keep everything within the same sentence, you can
keep using "e":

la je drna cdra se je pnde mdrktne je cbneka je li je dtfli txnike lo
gnmokeki lu cmlzdnu xbjoku
Distant era-A: some-E poor(E) & woodcutter(E): at(E,A) & (dutiful(I) &
daughter(I,E))-I: they(O,E,I)-O: hut-U: lived-in(O,U)

But this can get painful soon. We don't have a way to quantify over
multiple unconnected sentences. If you use the implicit binding rule
you could keep using "e" with "le je pnde mdrktne" restriction and
recover it in a new sentence:

la je drna cdra se je pnde mdrktne cbneka
Distant era-A, some-E poor(E) & woodcutter(E): at(E,A)

li je dtfli txnike lo gnmokeki lu cmlzdnu xbjoku
(dutiful(I) & daughter(I,E))-I: they(O,E,I)-O: hut-U: lived-in(O,U)

where the binding of each E in the second sentence is an implicit "le
je pnde mdrktne".

mu'o mi'e xorxes