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Lojbab: > At 02:23 PM 12/31/02 -0500, Invent Yourself wrote: > >On Tue, 31 Dec 2002, Jorge Llambias wrote: > > > We don't want to force people to claim a particular value exists, > > > of course. That's why da is wrong and that's why I use lo'e > > > there > > > >Does it make sense to want or need things that don't exist? It could be > >said that the sentence takes the speaker to an imaginary world where the > >item exists; it's hypothetical anyway, so why be fussy about truth values? > > That is why I suggested da'i-marking It's not so much a hang-up about existence as a way of capturing logically distinct readings. Consider something like "This could start a fire": this doesn't claim that there is a fire, but that is a by-product of the fact that "a fire" is within the scope of "could" -- it belongs to a subordinate bridi, not to the main bridi. We see exactly analogous ambiguities with "need", except here we don't have such an obvious way of getting the quantification into a subordinate bridi. --And.