[YG Conlang Archives] > [engelang group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >


[Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]

Re: [engelang] intensions & extensions (Xorban)



On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 11:43 PM, And Rosta <and.rosta@hidden.email> wrote:
>
> For "X knows Y to be the case", and other factive predicates, Y occurs in
> the same world as the knowing. For "X believes Y to be the case", Y does not
> necessarily occur in the same world as the believing. Perception verb
> complements can have either interpretation: "She saw a tiger approaching
> through the long grass" -- on one reading, there's a tiger approaching
> through the long grass, and she see this happening; on another reading,
> she's hallucinating, or maybe it's not a tiger but just a largeish cat. For
> know/believe you could argue that the predicate specifies whether or not its
> own event argument is necessarily in the same world as its x2; but you
> wouldn't want to say that for perception verbs, unless for every perception
> verb you had two versions, the knowy version and the believey version.

That seems like a different issue from whether a tiger in a film can
be said to be a tiger or not.

It seems to me that "she saw (what she thought was) a tiger" is not
very different from "she was talking to (who she thought was) John",
even if this is more common with perception verbs.

ma'a xrxe