Re: Requesting some challenging sentences

Gary Shannon wrote at 2005-10-29 18:59:50 (-0700)
 > --- caotope <johnvertical@...> wrote:
 >
 > > Okay, this is somewhat off the topic (with respect to this
 > > thread, not the list), but - I think I missed your point on the
 > > complement of "to". Why exactly can a verb not be its own
 > > complement? I'd think the copula was pretty much *defined* as the
 > > binary operator for which a = b and b = a are equal (or as the
 > > verb that *is* its own complement).  (Unless you want to get
 > > philosophical on how you perhaps cannot include "equality" in the
 > > defition of the copula.)
 >
 > Actually, I had thought of the Soaloa word "to" as
 > meaning "has the attribute" (as I translated in a few
 > early examples on the page) so that we could say
 > "Apple has the attribute red" but not "Red has the
 > attribute apple." No equality is meant by this
 > meaning. A different word altogether would be needed
 > to say "An apple is a fruit" because what we'd really
 > be saying is "apple is a member of the class fruit"
 > which is also not equality. In Soaloa, two things
 > cannot be equal unless they are instances of the same
 > thing, and then they can only be equal if they are not
 > distinguished. Thus we could say "an electron is
 > (equals) an electron" since they are all the same when
 > not distinguished by location, but we could not say
 > "This electron is (equlas) thyat electron since we are
 > implying something that distinguishes them.

Certainly, most copular predicates are not equational.  But what about
"Hesperus is Phosphorus"?

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