UI scope - Take 2

Interjections

No scope.

Illocutionaries

An illocutionary has scope over the bridi that contains it. Prenexable elements that precede the illocutionary in the bridi are outside the scope of the illocutionary.

Presuppositionals

CLL's statement that "Normally, an attitudinal applies to the preceding word only" makes little sense except for presuppositionals. CLL rules are the following (Ch 19.8):

  • default: scope over previous word
  • {fu'e UI .... fu'o} for marking scope explicitly
  • terminator + UI: scope over phrase terminated by the terminator

I don't know if these are adequate, but we can assume them correct unless we find problems with them.

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xorxes:
Don't presuppositionals have some kind of scope over the bridi that contains it too? I'm thinking of this example you gave recently:

Even George Bush despises himself.
Even George Bush despises George Bush.

We could translate those as:

la djordj buc ji'asai tolsi'a ri
la djordj buc ji'asai tolsi'a la djordj buc

but that would mean that ri is acting as a variable within the scope of the presuppositional {ji'asai}. In the first case, the presupposition is that there are others with the property {le ka ce'u tolsi'a ri} and that George Bush is an extreme case. In the second case the presupposed property is {le ka ce'u tolsi'a la djordj buc}.

We can also have:

George Bush despises even himself.

where the property in question is {le ka la djordj buc tolsi'a ce'u}. If this is lojbanized as:

la djordj buc tolsi'a ri ji'asai

This would mean that the 'focus' of the presuppositional is marked by its position in the bridi, that following anaphora act as variables for that focus, and that the presuppositional scope is the whole bridi. The scope presumably would not extend beyond the bridi.

And: The simple single-phrase scope holds good for the ordinary cases, such as all or most of the discursive UI. 'Even' and 'only' are trickier. But I don't see why they should be presuppositionals. Even though English 'even' (though not 'only') is said to be presuppositional, I don't see why it should be in Lojban. Compare the nonpresuppositionality of x2 of djuno compared to the presuppositionality of English 'know'. If one really wants to say complex stuff presuppositionally, one can resort to sei & toi.
In this case, either some UI should be in other selmaho, or some UI are truthconditional, or some UI need to have their meaning tweaked to something more aptly presuppositional.


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