Re: veridicality in English

[John Cowan <cowan@DRV.CBC.COM>]

la .and. cusku di'e

> I don't accept these as counterexamples. "Veridical/nonveridical"
> do not mean "true/false". They mean "asserted (by the speaker)
> to be true/false".

I use the term "veridical description" to mean "a description
whose truthful applicability to its referent is *essential* to the
truth-claim of the surrounding sentence".

Either "the" or "a" can prefix a veridical description in
English.  If I say "There's a horse in that field", this cannot
be true unless the referent really is a horse.  Likewise, if I say
(with Paul Revere) "The British [persons] are coming!", this cannot be
true unless it is the British who are coming.

Likewise, the use of "a" to indicate a new referent can override
any default veridicality.  The narrative use of  "A man went to the
store yesterday" does not require that the referent really is a man.

Rather, I take the traditional view:  "the"/"a" do not encode
specificity or veridicality except by accident.  What they primarily
encode is definiteness (defined as "listener knows what's meant").

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban