[YG Conlang Archives] > [jboske group] > messages [Date Index] [Thread Index] >
| This is really about {lo'e} as used in Llamban, but I did not put it in the title to avoid offending xod's legitimate complaint. In an effort to salvage the gold of xorxes intuitions from the dross of his theory and presentation, let me single out some cases (probably not all) where those intuitions are employed. These are cases of English "a whatsis/ whatises" usually in oblique position with the following features: 1) the absence of a whatsis does not make the claim false (by itself anyhow), 2) the whatsis when present is a real whatsis directly acted upon in the primary sense of the predicate, not some intensional notion or something about masses or classes and statistics or typicality, 3) Which whatsis it is that receives the treatment is irrelevant to the truth, any one that happens along will do (the quantifier is inside the event, as it were, not prior to it). "I hit a whatsis" or "I hit whatsises" in this sense then have rather familiar looks, distinguished from one another by some internal means. The look is of the form "If any whatsis comes along, I hit it (or "the first one")." I don't think that this needs even to be CTF-subjunctive, since the non-case is a part of the whole. Consider: "I tame lions" -- even if I have never tamed a lion, this is a claim I can make, and it holds until put to the test, which amounts to putting me in a tame-it situation with a lion (the fact that it may be hard to say exactly what that situation is is one of the advantages of the collpased form). It doesn't matter what lion is used, any one that comes along will do -- and in this case, indeed, every one that comes along. Along the same line "I am looking for a whatsis" holds unchallenged (on this ground) as long as I don't find one and is put to the test when I do find any whatsis at all -- whichever one it is is what I was looking for (as we in fact say when, holding one, we are invited to looks some more: "No thanks, I've found what I was looking for"). And so on. Even the "I like chocolate" case has at lest one reading of this sort -- any choclate that comes along I like -- though this probably needs to be modified with a "generally" somewhere, since failure to like one particularly gross bit of chocolate should not count against the general claim. As I have said, this is probably not the whole lot, but it is an isolable, segment that can be set aside (along with the cases that are just {lo} or {loi}) in the interest of solving the remaining cases. It may, of course, turn out that the final solution encompasses these as well, in which case they can fall back into the stew. |