Re: veridicality in English

[And Rosta <a.rosta@UCLAN.AC.UK>]

Robin:
> John wrote:
> >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").
> >
> Absolutely! English articles have nothing to do with veridicality; they are
> primarily discourse devices.  "The dog" means something like "an entity I
> have in mind, which I regard as a particular member of the set of dogs, and
> with which I assume you are familiar".  If I say "I'm going to take the dog
> for a walk", you assume, ceteris paribus, that I really have a real dog,
> but this comes from the normal rules of discourse, not my use of "the".  I
> could actually have a pet alligator, which I jokingly refer to as "the dog".

In other words, you are saying that THE is nonveridical and
thereby demonstrating the falsity of your initial assertion.

Either that, or you would apply all of your reamrks to all
determiners. In this case, you're not making a point about
English versus Lojban. Rather, you're making a point not
couched in terms of truth-conditional semantics. Unless we
assume truth-conditional semantics, a discussion of veridicality
is meaningless.

tersenss due to haste: I'll have more time tomorrow

--And