Re: Subcategorisation (Was :response to John(lojbab) on sarcu)

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

Lojbab says
++++++++>
 Note that Colin often says that Lojban makes the distinction between sets,
masses, and individuals mandatory.  By the above reasoning this is also
not true.  "le se cmima" is a set, but doesn't look like one, and "le gunma"
is a mass and doesn't look like one.  Too much of these distinctions is
tied up in the the too-unsystematic, too idiosyncratic, and unbaselined and
continuously evolving place structures.

Thus I will not push for an explicit or mandatory distinction between du'u
and nu levels of abstraction in usage, even if there probably is one.  This
will undoubtedly lead to some abstraction level confusion in the case of
words like sarcu.
>+++++++

Our two positions are not inconsistent.
I now claim that the distinction between set, masses and individuals is an
obligatory grammatical SUBcategory. The level of abstraction is another such
(I'm still wondering about this idea of 2nd level abstractions).

There are some words and structures
which subcategorise accordingly (terbri which must be filled by a set, for
example). But not all contexts do subcategorise: the terbri of 'du' for example
are obviously not subcategorised.

But I must disagree with your examples.
"le se cmima" is not a set. It is one or more sets, each set taken as
an individual.
"le gunma" is not a mass. It is one or more masses, each mass taken as
an individual.

The pamoi terbri of 'se cmima' (ie the remoi terbri of 'cmima') subcategorises
for a set. '(ro) le (su'o)'  takes the items subjectively selected by the
 selgadri
one by one: it does not subcategorise, so the items may be sets, masses or
individuals.
Thus (for example) 'lei se cmima' does make sense, of a sort - it means 'the
mass of sets (with members ...)'

The subcategorical distinction is lexical and in a sense semantic; but it is
not an intrinsic semantics of the thing described, it is in the semantics of
how the thing is being related to the rest of the sentence. It is perfectly
possible to describe the same collection of (say) people as 'le prenu',
'lei prenu' and 'le'i prenu' - but the claims that can truthfully be made
about these descriptions are in general different.

All of the above goes for abstraction. The pamoi terbri of 'fasnu' is
 subcategorised
for abstraction, just like the pamoi terbri of 'rinka', and indeed the pamoi
 terbri of
'nu'. The form is not enough to tell us whether a sumti is +abstract or not:
we also need some lexical information (and, with pro-sumti, some anaphor as
well). But this does not vitiate the fundamental significance of these
 subcategories
to the language.
'le nu mi limna'
is a sumti which is +specific -veridical -mass -set +abstract
'le fasnu'
is a sumti which is +specific -veridical -mass -set +abstract
but you need the lexical entry for 'fasnu' to know this
On the other hand
'le xamgu'
is +specific -veridical -mass -set
with no specification for 'abstract'.

There is a further issue here, on the extent to which abstracts are
further subcategorised (eg, actions, states etc.) I haven't really been
following the discussion on this one, but I think it centred on the
semantics, and hasn't discussed the subcategorisation status.

        Colin