Re: lu'a

[jorge@PHYAST.PITT.EDU]

pc:
>         Xorxes has often made the point that the use for these operators
> that my interpretation (and I think Lojbab's) gives is useless, since we
> already have all the resulting descriptions in primitive form -- and
> shorter.  While this is true of unabbreviated forms, it does not take
> anaphorized references into account,

Anaphorized references are a mess on their own right, and I hesitate
to enter into that before having a firm ground to step on. But anyway...

There is no problem when the anaphora have a single referent, those are
the best sumti there are, they never give any trouble, long live the
singular reference! But what happens when there are more than one?
For example:

        ko'a goi le re gerku .....
        ........
        ........
        i ko'a batci lo nanmu

What does the last sentence say? Does it say that each of the two
dogs bites its own man, or do they both bite necessarily the same one?
In English, a use of "they" there would suggest the same man, but that
can only be the case in Lojban if {ko'a} is the mass of the two dogs.

I think I would prefer that {goi} have this massifying effect, because
then all assigned variables would always have single referents, and
it would be much much simpler to deal with them. (In this case, the
single referent of {ko'a} would be the pair of dogs, one entity.)

Since it is not yet clear to me how exactly {goi} works, I can't say
for sure what is the effect of {lu'a} and {lu'o}.

If {goi} does not massify, then {lu'o ko'a} gets the mass, and {ko'a}
by itself gets the individuals. (Or {su'o ko'a} if that is the desired
quantifier.) {lu'a ko'a} would not be that useful, unless the ko'as
as individuals have themselves clearly identifyable components, which
is not really the case for dogs.

If {goi} does massify (which I now think would be the best thing
to do) then {lu'a ko'a} gets the individual dogs, and {ko'a} by itself
gets the mass. {lu'o ko'a} would get a mass of the mass, which is
as far as I can tell indistinguishable from the simple mass, so that
would even agree with pc's theory.

In summary, before looking at the effect of lu'a et al on anaphora
it would be nice to know exactly what are the referents of the pure
anaphora. My vote goes for them to have a single mass referent.
Multiple reference will breed trouble.

Jorge