From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Mon Feb 1 01:00:49 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Mon, 1 Feb 1993 12:06:30 -0500 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 5488; Mon, 01 Feb 93 12:05:02 EST Received: from CUVMB.BITNET by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4948; Mon, 01 Feb 93 12:01:30 EST Date: Mon, 1 Feb 1993 09:00:49 -0800 Reply-To: jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU Sender: Lojban list From: jimc@MATH.UCLA.EDU Subject: Re: TECH: empathy in attitudinals (proposal) X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 27 Jan 93 15:47:11 EST." <9301272212.AA08003@julia.math.ucla.edu> Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: John Cowan writes: > However, there has been an increasing pull toward allowing attitudinals, > suitably marked, to express other people's feelings as well. In particular, > "se'inai" has been employed as an attitudinal modifier for this purpose. I have found it useful for attitudinals to describe the attitude of the subject of the bridi which the attitudinal is in. In the most common usages this will be the speaker, and a fair number of other-person usages are also subsumed automatically. If in addition you are allowed to treat the UI as if it were a BAI (sumti tcita) you can designate the person who has the attitude explicitly when needed, semantically like a little subordinate clause. The syntax for UI<->BAI emulation was the equivalent of: broda ui be do to mean "broda which you're happy about". In other words, a sumti normally just sticks to the selbri, but when the "be" glue word appears the sumti will stick to the preceeding item, in this case a UI rather than another sumti. Of course this was all worked out for Old Loglan. Some of the new UI's in Lojban may be more speaker-tropic than the old ones -- and in fact I was very tempted to make a blanket exception that ua-ue-ui-uo-uu always referred to the speaker, not the subject. Also there was a strong distinction between "discursives" and "attitudinals", and the item related by the discursives was usually or always "the previous discourse" rather than "the speaker". (Example: le bi'u cribe = the bear which is absent from the previous discourse, not the bear which the speaker is not familiar with.) The point of these weaselwords is that we should specify with each UI a default argument selected from speaker, subject or previous discourse. -- jimc