Re: Ambiguity

Hi!

A little late: happy new year to y'all.  I delved into some other
programming projects so I wasn't active here in the last few days.

Benct Philip Jonsson writes:
> On 2009-01-05 Roger Mills wrote:
>> An additional problem that gets a lot of
>> attention is that Prevli has inalienable
>> possession, so that in a sentence like "Mary
>> says that she will feed the baby", _baby_ MUST
>> carry a possessive suffix, usually -z, so "titi-
>> z" 'baby' can mean 'his/her baby' or (in
>> context) 'the baby'. One would assume that we
>> mean "Mary will feed (her own) baby", but what
>> if Mary is an aunt, a sitter, or just a helpful
>> friend, etc. ? (The pronoun "she" is also ambiguous--
>> Mary? someone else?) How necessary would it be
>> to be absolutely precise in cases like this? Or
>> should we just leave it to our old friend
>> "context"?
>...
>
> I have a strong feeling that natlangs with this
> kind of ambiguity would leave it to context.
I agree.  It is not *necessary* to disambiguate.  So the decision is
simply a question of design goal/personal taste for your conlang, I
think.

Greenlandic has a fourth person for this.  The second clause would use
a 'reflexive' 4th person subject ending on the verb.  'reflexive' it
is called -- it is a long-distant reflexive, because the reference is
in a different clause (so the 4th person is even possible as the
subject of the clause).

**Henrik

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