From the vaults: Quantifiers and specifiers

The following post was originally written on March 13, 2021, but never published because I was so frustrated not to be able to come to grips with the problem that became very manifest as I started trying to produce example sentences. I never deleted the draft, though, because I sort of enjoyed the exasperated sarcasm into which I rapidly deteriorated. Here it is for posterity.

I think I may thankfully have solved this problem eventually, at least in theory. Actual usage recommendations are still developing via...actual usage, and I still sort of cringe everytime I need an existential verb. Truly, resolving this overlap between the existential quantifier and the indefinite article may be Koa's most vexing, longest-standing problem.

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Ever since a Ling department party in 2002 I've been nervous about something. I've put it off and assured myself it was okay, I think because my Indo-European intuition was so strong, but today it has officially stopped making sense and by hook or by crook we're going to have to take another inventory of our articles and determine what they actually really mean.

The areas that cause nervousness are basically where quantifiers and specifiers intersect, for example:

* What is the difference between the existential quantifier and the indefinite article -- "a book is on the table" versus "there is a book on the table?"
* What is the difference between the universal quantifier and...well, actual statements of quantity -- "cats are evil" vs "all cats are evil?"

I've tried to tackle this before, first in this specifier flowchart from 2010 and then in this revision in 2012. I'm increasingly feeling that tickle, though, that tells me that I was making some assumptions based on misunderstandings or unwarranted conflation of levels of description. I'm seeing three levels at this point that these questions interact with, and we need to keep them separate: logical quantification, the discourse stage, and other pragmatic concerns.

Some specifiers are straightforward (I hope) and we can probably safely leave them out of this discussion: ka the definite article, signifying that the referent is already on the discourse stage and recognizable to everyone taking part in the discourse; ko abstraction of the predicate; and ti/to deictic markers ("this"/"that") when used to refer to physical proximity. What we're going to have to really rigorously investigate are a, hu, po, and ti/to in discursive rather than physical function.

What is actually the difference between a and hu? Let's explore in different syntactic positions and AFF/INT/NEG.

SUBJECT
hu mala i ne masa "there's a fly on the table, an (unspecific) fly is on the table"
a mala i ne masa "there's a (certain?!) fly on the table" uh what

ai hu mala i ne masa "is there a fly on the table? is an (unspecific) fly on the table?"
ai a mala i ne masa "is there a (certain) fly on the table?" yeah that's nonsense

na hu mala i ne masa, hu mala i na ne masa "there's no fly on the table"
na a mala i ne masa "okay this is stupid"

OBJECT
Where are you going? I need to buy "a" book today. Does that book already exist in the physical universe recognizable to the speaker, as in "a certain?" Traditional Koa would give you:

ni ki ala (po) pama he leo "I want to engage in book-buying today" (this surprised me)
ni ki ala a pama he leo "I want to buy a particular book today"
ni ki ala hu pama he leo "There's a book I want to buy today"

Shouldn't this really just be:

ni ki ala pama he leo "I want to buy a (some nonspecific) book today"
ni ki ala a/hu pama he leo "I want to buy a (specific but not on the discourse stage) book today" or "there's a book I want to buy today" depending on context
ni ki ala ti pama he leo "I want to buy a certain book today that's not on the discourse stage but will potentially be relevant to subsequent discourse FYI"

I don't want to do this anymore, this is idiotic. It's really just a question of which particle we want to keep in the a/hu role and which we want to free up for other meanings.