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Subject: [lojban] Pragmatics again : "Can we ask questions ?" "You've just
 asked one"
From: Escape Landsome <escaaape@gmail.com>
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In Renato Dentato's comics, I find the following bit of dialogue :

--- Can we ask questions ?

--- You've just asked one !

Although this is perfectly logical, I find this a little heavy, and I
wonder if the purpose of Lojban is to underline (or avoid) this kind
of thing.   You see, this bit of dialogue is something which tries,
(as it seems to me) to be "brilliant", but, in terms of common daily
speech capacity, it is rather just "idiotic".

"Can we ask questions ?" OBVIOUSLY means what the pupil had in mind...
  If the teacher cannot understand it, that's too bad for the teacher,
but it doesn't mean the pupil isn't logical.

Rather, it means that the logic of the sentence needs a pragmatic
component to be processed, on top on the semantic and the
morpho-syntactic components.   This is by long ago known in
linguistics area.

To make myselft clearer, the morpho-syntactic component analyses "can
we ask questions ?" as a question whether it is POSSIBLE ( ASK ( WE,
QUESTION+plural+non definite ) )

Then the semantic component understand what a question is, and who "we" are.

BUT there is a pragmatic component on top, which "kills" the too-many
interpretations that can be yielded out of that.   Precisely, the fact
that this question is ITSELF a question, is, in most of circumstances,
killed out of the blue, so as the "normal" interpretation only
remains.

And yeah, --- the way the pragmatic component works is still a topic
of research, it must be said...

All in all, except in the case Lojban is mainly dedicated to jokes,
puns, and "logical puns", the interpretation of this piece of dialogue
through a pragmatic component should raise not an atom of problem.

--esc

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