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On Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 10:40 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:
Now I am at a loss. l clearly binds a variable; does d? I was taking d to be just a variant of m, using real predicates and applying them to selected objects, but without insisting that they fit. So, da crba is a formula that says that "a is being said to be bears, but don't count on it -- you know what I mean", very like le in Lojban, in fact (which
is about the only reason I can think of to have it).
Technically speaking, "dV" does not bind the V that appears in its own desinence (vowel-ending), but it does bind the V inside the formula over which it has scope. Maybe the distinction would be clear if we thought of replacing every occurrence of V inside the formula under the scope of dV with V-prime. In other words:
da crba' = d[A] crb[A-prime]
A is the discourse-salient entities satisfying {A-prime is a bear} wrt A-prime
(e.g. the bear that's been getting into your trash)
da ptfa'ke'e
A is the discourse-salient entities satisfying {A-prime is your father} wrt A-prime.
So far, my reasoning goes by my internalized understanding of the meaning of the word "definite". If "d-" is supposed to be nonveridical, then it should be added to the language specification. In that case we'd have
da crba'
A is the discourse-salient entities nonveridically (i.e. possibly but not necessarily in some intensional context) satisfying {A-prime is a bear} wrt A-prime
... which would change the semantics slightly but wouldn't change how the variables are handled.
Just a terminological point: if d doesn't find the V that immediately follows it, it doesn't find any other occurrences of that V either -- that;s just how binding works. To be sure, the later occurrence of that same V has to refer to the same thing as the one with d, but that is just the way variables work. Putting a different vowel in the slapped on formula would ruin the whole effect "for the a, Fb". Salience is from the context of utterance, not something internal to the sentence (except
insofar as that is part of the context, of course). And please don't get intensionality into this; it's in a different ball-game.
Depends how you define "d", I guess. You could say that
da Ra <=> je slnta Ra, "the discourse-salient Rs"
I was thinking of a partitive definition like
da Ra = da Ra' <=> je la' Ra' mnaka' slnta, "the discourse-salient among Rs"
...which necessitates a separate binding of nominally the same but actually different variable.
I still don't understand what you mean by "binding" here, but I get the impression that, whatever it is, d does not bind in the usual sense, which is what I wanted to know. I also don't get the distinction between the salient Rs and the salient among the Rs, since, presumably the Rs are among the Rs, and conversely. That is, d adds salience (say) but does not yet make a term -- it presumably needs l or s or r for that (or a convention about unbound variables).
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