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On 9/28/06, John E. Clifford <clifford-j@hidden.email> wrote:
--- In jboske@yahoogroups.com, "Jorge Llambías" <jjllambias@...> wrote: > > Do you remember the subsumption tree you introduced for events? > If you can generalize that idea to other objects besides events, I think > you can get the gist of what I mean. Well, I apologize for calling them trees when they are strictly lattices -- each node my be under more than one other node where these higher nodes are not placed relative to one another(we might say they are all on the same level, but the notion of level doesn't make sense in potentially infinite arrays (though I think all these matrices have both a highest and a large number of lowest members)).
That sounds right, except perhaps about the lowest members. For
example, let's take the event of my going to the market. I guess
you would take one particular instance of my going to the market
(let's say one that occurred this morning) as a lowest member. But,
suppose John saw me going to the market from the window of his
house, and Mary saw me going to the market from the window of her
house. In one sense, we can say that they both saw the same thing.
In another sense, we can say that what Mary saw was different from
what John saw. I would allow my going to the market as seen by John
and my going to the market as seen by Mary to be (in some contexts)
two different members of the lattice, lower than and subsumed by the
one we had taken to be a lowest member. Or, if my going to te market
lasted from 9:16 to 10:07, then I would count an event that was just
like it but that lasted from 9:17 to 10:08 to also count as my going to
the market, and a whole lot of other slightly shifted events like these
would all be subsumed by the one event of my going to the market that
occured this morning.
In a given model {lo nu mi klama le zarci} might pick a single node
of the lattice, several (same-level) nodes, or we might not be able
to tell nor care whether it picks several same-level nodes or the one
node that subsumes them, or some nodes in some other intermediate
level. If we cannot tell what exactly it picks, and we do care to tell,
we need to ask the speaker to be more precise.
That said, I don't see how this fits into the present problem exactly.
I suppose you mean that {lo broda}in the "want" context stands for
some node or the nodes in some segment of some such lattice (the broda
one? the thing one? the Being one?)and that what we want is one of
these nodes (or, probably, the realization of one of these nodes,
since we usually really want (to have) brodas, not abstract nodes).
Of course none of the nodes will be called nodes in the object language.
In the object language any node at any level will count as a broda.
{lo nu mi klama le zarci} will always count, in the object language, as
an event or several events of my going to the market, never as a node
in a lattice. The lattice is just a metalinguistic tool.
I suppose that this can be fleshed in such a way as to do the trick, but I don't see the need for all the apparatus. Surely it is enough to use the (already needed) sense of (the event of having)a unicorn. But whatever it is we mean here, my point remains that we ought to say what we are using to block misunderstanding.
We ought to say as much as we need in a given context, and no more than we need, yes.
To be sure, if saying it
gets too complex, we might drop that suggestion, but it seems we can
find something short enough to be practicable. We would also like to
leave enough of the old English appearance to show just how we have
avoided the proble. In short, using {tu'a lo broda} for the narrow
scope version and {lo broda} for the broad scope version seems a very
efficient way to deal with the issue. We can worry about just what
{tu'a} means later (and, indeed, we already have a good deal of
latitude on that).
{tu'a} might be a marker that indicates a higher node up the lattice than might
be expected (as described in the lattice scheme). But from my point of view
an absence of {tu'a} ought not to be used to mark anything.
mu'o mi'e xorxes