Re: [engelang] Xorban Terminology - engelang messages

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 5:25 PM, John E. Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 1, 2012, at 3:27 PM, "Mike S." <maikxlx@gmail.com> wrote:

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 applyingJust 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.

If something like the second definition were to hold, then "d-" would be a shortcut for a formula *involving* a binding. The (a') inside Ra' would be bound by la', but the (a) inside slnta would be free. Going back to "da Ra", the (a) in da corresponds to the free (a) in slnta and the (a) in Ra refers to the (a) bound by la. It'd be two separate (a)s.

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.

There is a subtle distinction in this way: salient Rs would always have to be the simple intersections between salient things and Rs. What I was trying to indicate by invoking a partitive definition was a more arbitrary mapping from general domains to particulars. Maybe we can represent that as "slntmn" meaning "x1 is the salient among x2". Then we'd have

da Ra = da Ra' <=> je la' Ra' slntmnaka'

Since every mapping from x2 to x1 is potentially unique and unconstrained by other mappings, there could be results which seem non-intersective. For example wrt a given discourse, "the black [things]" might not include the black cat, even though "the black cat" might mean a certain black cat. In general "da je Qa Ra " need not be a subset of "da Ra", because the mappings could sidestep the simple intersections.

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).