Re: observatives (was JimC on Colin on ....... ad nauseam)

[Colin Fine <C.J.Fine@BRADFORD.AC.UK>]

Cowan responds to me:
> I'm not clear on the distinction you are making here.  If a sentence has
>no x1, it is an observative in every sense.  It may be that the x1 is
>supplied from some other piece of linguistic behavior rather than from
>the non-linguistic context (specifically, the previous bridi), but what
>of that?

I guess that what I'm saying (and I think I've said elsewhere) is that I
don't see any milage in the term 'observative'. If it is a syntactic term
for 'bridi with omitted x1' fair enough, though I think the justification for
having such a term is slender.
But  I had taken it to have some special semantic connotation (that
I've never been quite happy about) - perhaps an implied "ju'i" or "ko zgana
lenu".
The point I intended to make was that, though omission of the x1 was
facilitated to allow observatives in that latter sense, it is in fact being
used much more widely.

        Colin