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On Oct 15, 2012, at 7:53 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@hidden.email> wrote:
On Mon, Oct 15, 2012 at 9:31 PM, John E. Clifford <kali9putra@hidden.email> wrote:
> On Oct 15, 2012, at 5:31 PM, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@hidden.email> wrote:
>
> You can use the equivalent "la je je frmra se xsle pnsake nu drxake li
> je je frmri so xslo pnsiko ni drxiko mstaki" if you prefer.
>
> The form is "la je ccca nu ddda le je ccce ni ddde fffake"
>
> OK, so we work with the weakest claim about farmers with donkeys. That
> helps, as does shifting the conjunction so that what is added in the first
> case at least looks. But, of course, the shift is illegitimate, since the
> original is not conjunction-conjunction, but conjunction-particular, and
> the addition has to go in the particular, not outside (to keep the meaning).
Yes, I should have said "la je frmra se xsle je pnsake nu drxake li ji
frmri se xsle je pnsike ni drxike mstaki".
And you're right that it's not quite of the same form, but that
doesn't really matter. All we need is two forms that differ ony in
ni/nu. It doesn't really matter where the ni/nu appear within the
form, because "ni'u" will mark that place, whatever it is. The
substitution is:
le (X nu Y li X ni Y) msteki
= la X ni'u(ka) Y msta
where X and Y can be anything as long as "X ni Y" is a grammatical formula.
Well, X ni Y is (filled out phonologically) a legitimate grammatical form; the problem is that its syntactic components are not X, ni, and Y. I really think you have to go to basics here and creep forward as far as you can. La je frma se je xsle pnsake ni'u si je xsli je pnsaki drxaki ... .
> The difference that "ni'u" captures is the difference between, for
> example, "I prefer coffee with milk (rather than, say, tea)" vs "I
> prefer coffee with milk (rather than with nothing or with something
> else)". "la ni'u je ckfa ldra prfra'aka" vs "la je ckfa ni'u ldra
> prfra'aka".
>
> I prefer coffee with milk to anything else - even with implicit salience
> restrictions,
> this seems a little extreme.
Of course, more naturally, it would be "I prefer milky coffee to something" and then hope Gricean can sort it out.
I think it's more like "I prefer coffe with milk to whatever else". It
is extreme without context, but that's because "ni'u" is marking
everything in the restriction in that case, so it should be extreme. I
expect in general "ni'u" will mark a smaller portion of the formula.
> Contrasting with the negative case is an alternative way of thinking
> about it. "The A&B's are most of the A(whether or not)B's" is
> equivalent to "The A&B's are more than the A¬B's". But you need
> more transformations, because "most" is defined as something with
> respect to the total, rather than as a direct comparison of something
> with its complement.
>
> I would have thought this was a argument for having the basic word be
> "more", with most falling out as an easy special case. "more" is also more
> useful since it is not restricted to two classes.
We will certainly have a word for "more", but the case in question was
about quantifier predicates, or fractional predicates, or whatever you
want to call them, and "more" is not one of those. And "ni'u" was
originally introduced to deal with donkey sentences such as "most
farmers who own a donkey, beat it", interpreted as "most of the
farmers who own a donkey whether they beat it or not, are farmers who
own a donkey and do beat it", in such a way that you don't have to
repeat "farmers who own a donkey".
I'm not quite clear why more is different from most as to being a type of predicate, especially in this sort of case, where most is just more than not, not excelling all others, taken one by one. One Montague trick (he didn't originate it, but I forget who did), was t reduce all quantifiers to predicates and deal with binding separately (if at all). It's relevance here is unclear. I still don't see how ni'u really helps with donkey sentences. |