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On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 10:06 PM, Mike S. <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote: > On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 8:19 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@hidden.email> > wrote: >> >> In addition to P, F, H, G, which we might call the s-past, s-future, >> r-past and r-future, there are the simpler, less nuanced, l-past and >> l-future with a singularized view of a single past time and a single >> future time. > > I wonder if we're not risking a bit of circularity here. I do seem to > recall some semantic explanations of "l-" invoking situations, something to > the effect of "The speaker has some situation in mind when he says > such-and-such". Now the idea arises of defining some tenses and therefore > some situations by invoking "l-". That the speaker may have some situation in mind when saying something is not especially related to l-. The situation the speaker has in mind will help mould the universe of discourse, and in that sense it may determine what's available for l- to pick, but I don't see how that prevents there being different times and different ways of referring to them. We may think of time as consisting of an infinite sequence of time points, or we may, in a coarser view, think of there being just three times, past, present and future. The first view will allow us to make more nuanced distinctions, but in some situations that complexity is not really warranted. > I do vacillate on how to look at "l-", but I'll say that right now that I > am not sure that "singularized" is the best way to look at it. "Singularized" is only useful when describing how l- works with predicates that we don't typically take as having a singular extension. It's not the best way to describe l- in general, I agree. > Where I am > starting to lean is that "l-" is some sort of definiteness indicator, a > loose one which happens to admit generic readings, such as "the lion lives > in the jungle" (much as natural languages often use definite articles for > very much the same expressions). I think l- neutralizes any definite/indefinite distinction, but if you are happy with generics being definite, I think it may not hurt saying l- is definite. > If this were admitted, then we could > extend FOL with a sort of epsilon calculus (which is actually currently used > in contemporary linguistics) and have finally a formal basis for "l-". I don't know much about epsilon calculus. From reading http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epsilon-calculus/ and http://www.iep.utm.edu/ep-calc/ there does seem to be something of a connection. If l- was the epsilon thingy, quantifiers would then be defined as: sa sma mlta = la mlta mlta ra sma mlta = la na mlta mlta (The latter could be read as something like "that which is the closest thing we have to being a non-cat is a cat", which means everything is a cat.) co ma'a xrxe