Re: Comments from pc on various issues

[Mr Andrew Rosta <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>]

John Cowan:
> 4) I asked him about the referents of "le sumti" and "le bridi" -- are they
> linguistic objects, or the referents of those linguistic objects.  In
> the sentence "mi klama le zarci", is the sumti "mi", a text, or John Cowan,
> a person?  pc and lojbab both thought they were texts.  Occasional English-
> language use has been fuzzy, but the current place structures of "sumti"
> and "bridi" do not suggest linguistic objects.  I propose, therefore,
> changing them from the current place structures:
>
>         x1 is a/the argument of predicate/function x2 filling place x3
>
> and
>
>         x1 (du'u) is a predicate relationship with relation x2
>
> by adding "(text)" after sumti x1 and x2, and changing "du'u" to "text" after
> bridi x1.
>
>                 among arguments (sequence/set) x3

How does one convert from use to mention? For example, how can one
take _mlatu_, whose sense is the category of cats, and instead get
_'mlatu'_, whose sense is the category of the gismu _mlatu_.
In addition, how can we convert to a phononological, phonetic,
graphological or graphetic sense? (I.e. x1 is a [mlatu], x1 is a
/mlatu/, and so on.)

This may sound esoteric but it is of course *crucial* in metalinguistic
discourse. (Note that there is an open-ended set of sense conversions
of this sort, since these sense conversions are theory-dependent.)

---
And