Re: veridicality in English

[Robin Turner <robin@BILKENT.EDU.TR>]

la .and. cusku di'e:
>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.
>
What I am saying is that articles have nothing to do with veridicality, so
you could say that that "the" is nonveridical by default, but then you
could say that for any word.

>Either that, or you would apply all of your reamrks to all
>determiners.

No,just all the ones I've come across - with the obvious exception of "lo".

> 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.
>
Well, I'm not sure about how far you can take truth-conditional semantics
(further in Lojban than in English, I imagine).  As I said, I think English
articles have more to do with discourse than with the truth-value of a
sentence; thus "a discussion of veridicality is meaningless" with relation
to "the".  It may perhaps have some relevance with classifiers e.g. if I
say in Chinese "erben X" I would presumably be asserting that there are
really two X's which really are members of the set of squarish, flattish
objects referred to by "ben", but even then I'm not sure, since classifiers
are pretty metaphorical.



Robin Turner

Bilkent Universitesi,
IDMYO,
Ankara,
Turkey.

<http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/8309>