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Re: Metalanguage query

From:John Quijada <jq_ithkuil@...>
Date:Sunday, January 25, 2004, 22:51
On Sun, 25 Jan 2004 22:08:46 +0000, Jonathan Knibb <j_knibb@...>
wrote:

>Forgive me if I delurk briefly ... > >I've come across a concept for which I can't think of an elegant term. >Maybe someone can help? > >The first idea is that a word or phrase within an utterance refers to a >specific entity at a specific >time, and I'm using the word 'referent' to
denote the >entity-at-a-specific-time which is being >referred to. But the same word or phrase in another context could be >associated with a different
>referent - the word 'house' can mean my house now, your house now, your >house a year ago, >etc. The concept I need to verbalise is, for any given
word or phrase, *the >set of all its possible >referents*.
> >I'm thinking maybe something based on 'describe', but ... 'descriptum'? >'Describend'? >'Descript' (ugh)? Or is there something obvious I'm missing?
-------- Hmmm, nothing comes to mind from existing grammatical nomenclature. If I understand what you're describing, I have a category in Ithkuil that has some vague similarity (in a far more limited way compared to yours) that I call Designation. Other potential name suggestions are Specification, Manifestation, or a fancy-sounding but vague fabrication such as Prolocution or Collocution. --John Quijada "Occasionally, a few birds, a horse perhaps, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater. --Jorge Luis Borges (from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius")