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On 10/5/06, John E. Clifford <clifford-j@hidden.email> wrote:
I take all this as saying something like (though I'm not sure just what) that, from an absolute lattice, say Mr. Dog and all among it, a particular conversation constructs a sublattice of relevant items, maintaining their relative positions, but dropping intermediate nodes in various ways, to suit the circumstances.
I would say "Mr. Dog and all it subsumes" rather than "Mr. Dog and all among it".
Thus, for example, talk about dog breeds would create a piece of the dog lattice in whihc all the breeds were on "the same level" regardless of how they fell outin the original.
All the breeds (i.e. all the things that count as dogs in that conversation), would be on the same level, right. That would be the only level of dogs present in the domain of the conversation.
Similarly, just talking about dogs might put all dogs (even various defective ones or both the part and the whole of one) on the same level.
Well, it will always be the case that the talk is about dogs, if the dog lattice is involved. In the dog lattice there is nothing but dogs. I suspect that both the part and the whole of a dog could not each count as one dog in the same context. Each could count as one dog by itself, but not in the same context in which the other counts as one dog. (Unless it's a very weird metalinguistic conversation such as the one we're having now.)
And this level becomes the focus of remarks, the other levels available as framework but not directly as topic -- or so only with some extra effort.
I would say the level under consideration is the only part of the lattice that is in the domain of discourse, I'm not sure if that is different from saying that it is the focus of remarks.
Well, I don't understand two of the distinctions here: among v subsumption (especially the latter) and token v type as different again from amongness. On the latter, I would think that the main place (surely not the only one) for a token to be would be among its type: if not there, then in what sense is it really a token of that type?
The distinction would be in counting. The broda type counts as one broda, whereas the broda token is not one broda among one broda but one broda among many brodas.
They may be proper to different discourse, but that doesn't affect how they are in fact (metalinguistically if you will) arranged. And indeed it seems that token-type pairs tend to turn up a lot in discourse -- as does breed-dog and other such conventional genus-species pairs.
Sure, but when they turn up together they do so as members of different lattices, not of the same lattice. (Or, if they do for a while turn up together as members of the same lattice, they do it in metalinguistic type of discourse, such as "when you say the book contains 1000 words, do you mean word types or word tokens?") mu'o mi'e xorxes