tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Wed Jan 06 13:00:29 2010
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next]
Re: qoSwIj
On Wed, Jan 6, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Christopher Doty <[email protected]> wrote:
> If you ask someone what something is, and they reply that ÊIt is a
> penÊ, ÊitÊ and ÊpenÊ are the same thing... The ÊitÊ doesnÊt magically
> stand for something else that you have to figure out...
There's no magic, only logic. There is no need to say "As for the
pen, it is a pen." If you have established that "it" refers to the
pen, then saying "it is a pen" is tautological. If you haven't yet
established such a thing, then the "it" must refer to something else.
The sentence in question may establish that the something else is in
fact a pen, and it may always have been a pen, but its pen-ness was
not yet established until the new sentence. You can't take advantage
of the establishment before it happens. :)
> This isnÊt a tautology, youÊre providing a label for the it...
You're providing a label for the thing that "it" refers to. You're
not supplying the antecedent for the pronoun itself. Let's
distinguish words from referents.
When I say, "What is that?" the pronoun "that" must have a referent,
even though it has no antecedent within the sentence itself. The
referent is provided by context (perhaps by a previous statement, or
perhaps, in person, by pointing). Maybe it's as simple as replacing
"that" with "that thing over there", but however vaguely specified,
there has to be a referent, or the sentence is meaningless. While it
is true that the sentence is copular, linking "what" and "that" to
each other so that they both refer to the same referent, simply
pointing out that "that" refers to "what" or vice-versa is
insufficient to establish a referent for either word.
When I say, "Today is my birthday." I'm linking two nouns, "today"
and "birthday". When I say "As for today, it is my birthday", or
answer a question like "What's today?" with "It's my birthday", I'm
doing the same thing through one level of indirection via the pronoun
"it". But if I say "It is my birthday today", what am I linking?
What is the referent of the "it"? Not "today", which is an adverb
here, and the noun would make it redundant: "Today, today is my
birthday."? (Maybe if you're talking about the symbol instead of the
concept: "Today, 'today' is my birthday. Yesterday, 'tomorrow' was my
birthday. Tomorrow, 'yesterday' will be my birthday." etc.)
The sentence appears to have no referent for the subject. Such
sentences abound in English, and are readily understood by
Anglophones. But it's not clear that they work in tlhIngan Hol.
Although you could actually interpret the {SIS} example as supporting
{DaHjaj qoSwIj 'oH}; after all, if the verb {SIS} can have an
unspecified - really, unspecifiable - subject (without {-lu'} etc),
why can't the pronoun-acting-as-a-verb {'oH}? But even when acting as
a verb, {'oH} has to be able to stand in place of its subject, and I
think that's the uncertainty here.
-marqoS
--
Mark J. Reed <[email protected]>
![[KLI Member]](/pics/KLImemberbutton.gif "[KLI Member]"){kind=small}