Re: real vs. nominal anaphora

[cowan (John Cowan)]

kartr. djim. writes:
> In school-taught English the term "antecedent" means the "thing" that the
> anaphor represents.  Of course they don't get into whether the antecedent
> is a phrase, a real-world object (referent), or something in between.

"Antecedent", of course.  Very well, let "equivalent" -> "antecedent".

> > Now the Lojban interpretation is not that anaphora are replaced by their
> > referents: that would be impossible.  A referent is extra-linguistic,
> > and cannot be placed in a sentence.  * * *
> > Sentences are composed only of words, not of words and other objects.
> 
> Hmmm, is this true?  On the surface it is true, but my introspection is
> that when I process a sentence the words get chucked quite early and the
> whole thing is represented by internal symbols.

Remember that I use the term "referent" in a strictly "real" sense.  It
does not refer to anything linguistic, whether a surface word or a deep
representative of the word.  The referent of the word "Boston" is the
city of Boston, and nothing else.

> This design is reasonable.  However, as I said before, in the final step
> of linguistic processing where the internal referent pointers are set up,
> you very much want to avoid extraneous considerations such as picking 
> which phrase an anaphor really represents, and this is why I am so fixated
> on nailing down the antecedent early, and copying the words so the final
> step doesn't even see the anaphora.  Of course with ra'o I would copy
> different words than without it.  

This is impossible.  When resolving an anaphor such as "mi", you simply
do not know whether the utterance containing the "mi" will ever be referred
to by a "go'V ra'o" later down the line.  In the case of "go'u ra'o", 
where "go'u" repeats a far-past utterance, you could be required to
look ahead indefinitely far.

> Perhaps the right way to phrase a unified Lojban and -gua!spi policy is:
> An anaphor shall be understood *as if* its antecedent had been copied out
> in full at that place.  It is understood that under the influence of ra'o
> if the antecedent was copied in via an anaphor, the original anaphor
> shall be restored and rebound.  

Ah yes, the "as if" rule.  Sounds all right to me, but then I'm not the
Lojban pope.  :-)

-- 
cowan@snark.thyrsus.com		...!uunet!cbmvax!snark!cowan
		e'osai ko sarji la lojban