quantifiers:existential import

["John E. Clifford" <pcliffje@CRL.COM>]

        The second issue that seems to be exciting the usual and new
suspects and addendi is existential import.  Here I am somewhat puzzled
by Cowan's entry.  My memory is that Cowan wrote or at least edited into
final form all or almost all the papers that make up the reference
grammar, commentary, or what have you.  I had in hand (and so
presumably still have somewhere -- but God knows where after seven
shifts in three years) three drafts of a paper which dealt with quantifiers
and descriptors: a rough draft, a polished draft and a rather later form that
came with a number of other papers of this set as part of the then current
offering.  I assume that Cowan wrote at least one of the drafts and the
final form and that the other draft is either mine or a response to some
comments of mine.  In all three of those papers _ro da poi broda_ was
explained as having existential import, i.e., as asserting that there are
brodas as well as saying something about all of them; it was, in addition,
at one point glossed as "every broda."  On the other hand, _lo broda_ was
at that time glossed as "all brodas," as the set taken in conjunctive
distribution, and explicitly said to verify _lo broda cu brode_ when there
were no brodas.  Subsequently (or maybe just between drafts and final
form) the press to specify implicit quantifiers, internal and external, took
hold and _lo_ was specified with _ro_ in both places, on the assumption -
- which I did not notice to correct -- that the universal quantifier by itself
does not imply the particular quantifier.
        But then the evidence came in that _su'o lo broda_ was going to
be a much more commonly used expression than _ro lo broda_ and so --
by a legislative act, I think -- the implicit external quantifier on _lo_ was
changed to _su'o_.  That meant that the implicit internal quantifier could
no longer be _ro_ -- if that were understood to be without existential
import -- at the risk of contradiction.  Since the _ro_ was kept, it must be
that it was corrected -- albeit unannounced -- to its normal existentially
importing reading.  The unannouncement seems to have led to the
occasional use of _ro lo broda_ for cases where there were no brodas and
got me off tracing out the history and finally making the belated
announcement.  (OK, so it was only four or five shifts ago, since that
search has to have been since I got on the list and read the discussion
about  _ro lo [unicorns]_.)  At least the first draft of the three papers was
still questioning _ro broda_ and in the last it was associated with _ro da
poi broda_.  It was not to go over to _ro lo broda_ until the _ro_ stopped
being implicit -- or else the shift was a part of that change.  In any case,
the possibility that _ro broda_ was a separate form, not an abbreviation of
an existing form, never was considered in those drafts nor the later
correction notes.  No later notes that I saw in my search ever changed the
line on _ro da poi broda_.
pc>|83