BPFK Section: Anaphoric Pro-sumti
In fact there is a kind of scope leaping in most languages. English has "any" (universal) and "a certain" (particular) and most other languages have the same. But English (and most other languages, I think) can also do it with something like anaphora (because some of the cases are not typical anaphora: same referent. But one that is is the "If a boy comes to the dance, all the girls will dance with him" which means (inter alia, to be sure) "For all x, if x is a boy and comes to the dance, all the girl (scl. at the dance) will dance with x" ( the alia include insisting that this holds only if exactly one boy comes — stress on the "a" — and the preselection of the boy "If a certain boy comes ..." which is the conditional with a particular rather than a universal quantifier). The universal here is the result of the context where the "a" occurs: verso — in the scope of a single negation (so a short for "any") Logics other than Pierce's existential graphs don't show this at all
well, since they read scope too early in the game,. as we might say. In fact, pierce's system would suggest that the best way to get a leaper would be just this: pick it up outside the apparently overlying scope. But it would be nice to do it in any case, just to avoid terribly twisted sentences occasionally needed to get the quantifiers right — at the cost of intelligibility.
wikidiscuss@lojban.org wrote:ko'a viska re nanmu goi ko'e joi ko'i
Assigning pro-sumti with quantified expressions can be tricky. If the quantifier is under the scope of another quantifier, a negation, or perhaps something else, the assigned ko'a won't make much sense outside of that scope, or else it will force the quantifier out. Example:
mi na viska re nanmu goi ko'a joi ko'e
i ko'a cu clani i ko'e cu tordu
Does that mean "It is not the case that I saw two men, ko'a and ko'e. Ko'a is tall and ko'e is short."? If it does, then {re nanmu} is gaining scope over {na}, thanks to {ko'a joi ko'e}. Otherwise the sentence is meaningless, because "It is not the case that I saw two men" does not provide any referents for ko'a and ko'e outside of the scope of {na}.
It actually migh not be a bad idea to have this possibility for scope leaping.
mu'o mi'e xorxes