Re: plural

[Logical Language Group <lojbab>]

la lojbab. poi na du mi cusku di'e

> I'm not sure.  We have the space-time reference conventions, including "story
> time" etc. as defaults for tense given most contexts, but in actual usage
> I often say "mi broda" as implying the past tense.  The space time reference
> convention would not generate the past tense as the default.

I don't believe there is any such "STR convention", and the IJ paper was
not intended to say so.  The "STR convention", if you want to call it that,
is that when a tense >is< given such as "pu", it is intended to be relative
to the speaker's here-and-now.  A tenseless sentence is vague as to tense,
and when you say "mi broda" meaning "mi pu broda", you are quite correct.

In story time, matters are different.  There an omitted tense does default
to "bazi" or something like it.

> All Lojban defaults are to some extent probable values for an ellipsis, at
> least in my opinion.  I would be willing to be overridden on this by Cowan
> and/or pc, since I don't think it has been discussed explicitly in design
> discussions.  I think it has just been my implicit (default? %^) assumption.

I think the default quantifiers are really defaults, not just probable values.
Consider the following excerpt from the draft textbook, pp. 5-30-31 of the
printed version:

# ... For example, take the English sentence "The three people carried the
# bottles."  The English is highly ambiguous - did they carry the bottles
# together, or separately (possibly at three different times), or did they
# do it as a mass individual (which might mean that only two of them actually
# did the carrying while the other supervised).  The latter might seem
# unlikely in this instance, but a parallel sentence "The baseball team
# hit a home run." uses exactly this interpretation.
#
# One possible translation:
#
#		lei ci prenu cu bevri le botpi
#
# First, we are assuming that there are three particular people that the
# speaker has in mind.  (If we were to use "loi ci prenu", we would be making
# a false statement, since there are more than three in the set of all people -
# remember that the quantifier after the descriptor enumerates the set being
# described.)  We have particular bottles in mind, but we want it to be clear
# that all of the bottles were carried.  Using "lei" as a descriptor for the
# bottles:
#
#		lei ci prenu cu bevri lei botpi
#
# would make the sentence true if the people managed to carry only part of the
# bottles, so it is too weak a claim to express the most likely meaning of
# the English.
#
# If the speaker wishes to clearly claim that the three individuals jointly
# participated in carrying the bottles, the quantified mass description
# would be accurate:
#
#		piro lei ci prenu cu bevri le botpi
#
# We use a fraction "piro" as the selecting quantifier, since a mass is always
# treated as a single unit.  "ro", or any quantifier larger than one, would
# be incorrect in that position:
#
#		*re lei ci prenu cu bevri le botpi
#
# is grammatical, but nonsense.
#
# If we do not use piro, the Lojban implicitly is interpreted as:
#
#		pisu'o lei ci prenu cu bevri le botpi
#
# which would allow one of the three to perform the act on behalf of both
# [all? - JC] of them.  The default quantifiers for all three mass descriptors
# are "pisu'o loi/lei/lai ro (description)".
#
# Using "le ci prenu" rules out the concept of one or two performing the act
# [of - JC] carrying the bottles for all three of them, because the implicit
# quantifier is "ro le ci prenu" (each of them did it).  Note that:
#
#		ro le ci prenu cu bevri le botpi
#
# requires that each of the people separately carries all of the bottles
# being referred to.  The statement does not allow for teamwork.
#
# On the other hand:
#
#		ro le ci prenu cu bevri lei botpi
#
# allows each of the people to carry some of the bottles without necessarily
# implying that all of the bottles were carried by any one of the three.
#
# Note that we can more explicitly clarify how many acts of carrying
# occurred [something that And asks about a lot - JC] by specifically
# saying so (using the abstraction operator NU).
#
#		piro lei ci prenu cu zukte le pa nu bevri le mu botpi
#
# is completely explicit that "All of the three specific people participated
# in the single act of carrying five particular bottles, with none of them
# necessarily bearing all of the burden."
#
# If the sentence had been the even more ambiguous "Three people carried the
# bottles.", we would have had to consider "lo" as a descriptor for "prenu":
#
#		ci lo prenu cu bevri lei botpi
#
# It is not clear in the ENglish whether there are three particular referents
# being described as people (could they really be aliens? [but intelligent
# aliens >are< {prenu} if not {remna} - JC]) or whether the claim describes
# just any three people.
#
# Clearly, in Lojban, the choice of descriptors takes some care, but the
# result is considerable power and flexibility of expression.

Now I find that to be an admirably clear exposition, not only of the specific
point about default quantifiers, but about the default quantifier for "lei",
the distributivity of "le" and multiple "le"s, and even the matter of "any".
I agree with everything in it.  If anyone disagrees, let him speak now or
forever hold his peace.  :-)

> And I do think that the ability to use "le" arbitrarily to minimize metaphysi-
> cal bias (which is what we label such things as singular/plural and mass/
> distributive being mandatory distinctions) is an important precept of the language.

And I think, on the contrary, that individual/mass/set is one of the true
mandatory distinctions that Lojban makes.

-- 
John Cowan		sharing account <lojbab@access.digex.net> for now
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban.