Re: LE and VOI

[JORGE JOAQUIN LLAMBIAS <jorge@INTERMEDIA.COM.AR>]

And:
>So the following combos are useful:
>
>1 nonspecific, veridical
>2 specific, veridical, "indefinite" (= referent not (necessarily)
>   identifiable by addressee)
>3 specific, nonveridical, "definite" (= referent not (necessarily)
>   identifiable by addressee)
>
>Function 1 is performed by {lo}. Functions 2 & 3 are both
>performed by {le}. Both 2 & 3 are useful, & it wd be nice to
>think of an easy way to distinguish them.

Your martini example shows that combo 3 is useful, and that's
what we have. I don't see in what case is combo 2 useful. My
impression is that when you have specificity, veridicality
becomes irrelevant. A specific reference is just a tag on the
referent, much like a name. It doesn't make sense to ask
whether a name is veridical or not: all it matters is whether it
succeeds in identifying its referent or not.  When you want to
make a claim about a specific cat for example, the tag "mlatu"
is usually the most convenient, and so people will usually
prefer "veridical" tags, not in order to make a claim but to identify
the referent easily. Even for indefinite specifics (I take that to
mean things like "the oldest cat in the world", is that right?)
even for them veridicality is not required: is the description
enough for your audience to identify which referent you mean,
at least in principle? Then there's no need for you to be claiming
that your referent actually is the oldest cat in the world. You may
go ahead and claim that as well, but your claim will be obvious to
your audience anyway if they identified correctly what you referred
to with your tag.

For specific reference, veridicality is mostly irrelevant.

For non-specific reference veridicality is useful, because it
is a convenient way of informing your audince over which set
you're running your quantifiers.

You forgot combo 4 in your list above:

4 nonspecific, nonveridical

which is what we have in things like {su'o le mlatu} = "at least one
of the cats of which I'm talking about". Here the set over which we
quantify is referred to nonveridically. (In most cases it will consist
of real cats, but it doesn't matter as long as our audience
understands which so-called cats are the members of the set over
which we quantify.)

co'o mi'e xorxes