Re: GLI Re: Indirect questions

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

la .and. cusku di'e

> OK. But I think your position entails that la`e should include
> all entailments, given that it is established which world the
> utterance is talking about. So I think you are in effect
> arguing that {la`e lu she painted the house his favourite
> colour} can be the proposition "She painted the house blue".
> I'm unhappy with that.

Remember that "la'e" is rather broad: it maps a reference to its
referent.  It is already established that la'e zoi .gy. The Red
Pony .gy. cu cukta, for example.  Here the referent of the words
is a certain book, not simply the meaning of those words.

> There are certain contexts where Q-kau just doesn't make any sense
> (e.g. if it occured within a sumti of the majority of gismu).

Indeed, "kau" makes no sense except within a NU-bridi, and only
for certain members of NU at that, of which "du'u" is the most
prominent.  There may, I say may, be others, notably "ka",
since "du'u" is closely related to "ka".  In any event, sumti
based on NU-bridi make little sense for many selbri (or, more
simply and Quinishly, lead to false bridi:  le nu mi nanmu cu
gerku is simply false, not meaningless, not a category mistake).

> However, I think I now find myself able to rationalize such a
> convention. {cusku le se du`u xu kau Y} would mean "utter a
> piece of text that says whether Y is true". Logically, that would
> be:

Doubtless then "la djan. cusku le se du'u ma kau klama le zarci"
means that John said who went to the store, which seems good to me.

> whereas {cusku le se du`u Y} would be
>
>  utter a piece of text, t, such that t expresses (a
>    truth-conditional equivalent of) Y.

That is too weak, or "John said that 2+2=4" would be a fair
report of John saying that 4+4=8, since "2+2=4" and "4+4=8"
are truth-conditionally equivalent.  Or do you mean something
different by "a truth-conditional equivalent"?

> (I hope
> that a discovery of the regularity is waiting over the horizon.)

Amen.

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