From @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Mon Apr 26 19:07:33 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 27 Apr 1993 10:19:01 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 1791; Tue, 27 Apr 93 10:18:15 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4345; Tue, 27 Apr 93 10:17:52 EST Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 23:07:33 -0400 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Esperanto on sci.lang pt 3 of 4 X-To: conlang@diku.dk, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Message-ID: Complexity of Esperanto Syntax Pt 3 of 4 MR3:(cont. on KM1 on MR2) Hmm, that's an interesting claim, but surely rather too strong. Do you really maintain that Mi scias, ke mia fratino parolas Maundsbarlingve. 'I know that my sister speaks Moundsbar.' doesn't imply that my sister speaks Moundsbar (and, for that matter, that my sister exists)? KM3: [not imply] presuppose As I said before we really don't understand presupposition, even fundamentally. If *I* uttered the above sentence I would be making those presuppositions, because I would be tacitly assuming that 'scii' precisely corresponds to my native 'know' and is therefore factive. Obviously this would not necessarily hold for speakers of a language in which one may use a near equivalent of Eng. 'know' and follow it with an indication of doubt, e.g. saying literally John knows Mary is ill, but maybe she's not. I'm told you can get such things in Japanese; perhaps someone could comment on that. MR5: I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around the concept of a non-factive 'know'. Wouldn't such a term really be an equivalent of 'believe' not 'know'? MR3:(cont. on KM1 on MR2) Or that you can't baptize a baby, christen a ship, or open a meeting in Esperanto? KM3: Note that none of this can be decided on purely linguistic grounds. You can do any of this stuff that some culture has legitimated in E. You could also do it in Lojban or Pig Latin if such were legitimated. NB: you could have doubts about legitimacy. Austin in _How to Do Things with Words_ (the original modern statement of speech act theory) actually makes provision for cases where a person might do something like try to perform a marriage in Esperanto only to find it was not legitimate (culture can't provide for every contingency). Possible uncertainties like this, for Austin, merely reinforced his contention that it all depends on society, not language. Turning to less institutional examples, if some Esperantist says to me something like Sendube mi cxeestos la kunvenon. Doubtlessly I will attend the meeting. I really *don't* know whether that was a promise or not! It could be a hedge. I have to guess at the speaker's intent, which depends on non-linguistic factors. Somebody suggested earlier that such things could be listed in lexical entries in dictionaries. But words like 'sendube' won't even be in dictionaries, because they're regularly derived forms..."Mi kulpigxis pro tio" does that count as an admission of guilt or not? My PV doesn't say... MR5: I think it was Takao Suzuki who complained that dictionaries are no good at defining words-- that is, at explaining how words fit into the semantic structure of the language. Certain pragmatic information seems to me to be part of the definition of a word, whether or not dictionaries do it that way. For instance, "but" differs from "and" chiefly pragmatically, does it not? With your "Sendube..." example, however, I don't think even a pragmatically savvy dictionary could help you with (for instance) a Slavic speaker who (from an Anglo point of view) overuses absolute terms like "sendube"; or with an Indonesian speaker who is just saying what he expects you want to hear; or any kind of speaker who just happens to be idly speculating, or resolving, or lying, rather than promising. MR3:(cont. on KM1 on MR2) You also seem to assume that *no* aspects of culture are shared, at least among people who speak Esperanto. Remember, only a restricted subset of human cultures are likely to learn it-- I doubt there are any Yanomamo Esperantists. For that matter, on your own showing Esperantists have at least one shared cultural phenomenon-- the Esperanto movement itself. KM3: Agreed. And I might add there's quite a lot more to it than outsiders are aware of; it isn't *just* interlanguage advocacy. It's interesting and subtle, and (I think) becoming more so. KM1:(cont. on MR2) For the sake of the uninitiated, if you offered me coffee while giving me lunch and I answered, Cximatene mi havis tason. (I had a cup this morning.) you would infer that I was referring to a cup of coffee, that I not only "had" it but drank it (guessing or knowing the anglicism), that the coffee was brewed rather than out of the can, and that I didn't want any more coffee, though none of this was in my utterance. ID2:(on KM1) I would interpret "mi havis _x_" as `I had _x_ in my possession' (and probably still have it, unless it changed owner or ceased to exist). KM2: In this *context* you would so interpret it? ID2: In English "I had" can mean `I consumed', but this is not a culture- related inference, it is the polysemy of the word "have". I don't think Esperanto "havi" has those additional meanings (the library with the dictionaries, where such things ought to be listed, is too long a walk away). KM2: (I intentionally included an Anglicism which the hearer has to interpret because the discussion was in the context of Esperanto and these things happen when Esperanto is used.) It is not possible to build all implicatures into lexical meaning, because a given utterance in context has an indefinite number of implicatures. ID3: Yet it is not the case that any word can mean anything, as H Dumpty would have it. KM4: I too disagree with Mr Dumpty: it is not the case that any word can mean anything. But given appropriate context, any word(s) can give rise to just about any *implicature.* (For me pragmatics and semantics are quite distinct; this is not an unusual view.) KM2:(cont.) So some of them have to be conversational. As a standard example, the following, uttered by a helpful bystander to a motorist whose Hyundai is out of gas: There's a gas station around the corner. Implicatures include belief on the part of the bystander that the station is open it has gas (the tanks are not empty) either the person on duty knows how to put the gas in, or there is a self-serve island the station owner does not have a policy of not serving Hyundai owners the station is not at the time in the process of being held up by a gang of hoodlums ... As you can see the list goes on and on; we can establish that all of these things really are implicated by the utterance by noting the bizarreness reaction of the motorist upon arriving at the gas station and finding any of the above propositions to be false. (Or at least we can perform this as a mental experiment.) After all, the helpful bystander didn't *say* the station was *not* being held up; etc. etc. ID3: Some implicatures are licensed by the language, and those I lay at the door of lexical meaning. The example with the petrol station is not language-specific, and should therefore work in Esperanto as well as in any natural language. KM4: Conversational implicatures are in general indeed not language-specific; this is why the last thing we want to do is to lay them at the door of lexical meaning. The implicatures in the example with the petrol station came from the belief-worlds of the participants in the conversation, something we normally associate with culture. ID4: But do we associate it with a particular culture, or with some universal feature of verbal communication? Is there a group of people for whom the question `Is there an xyz nearby?' in the appropriate setting does not imply `... such that I can take advantage of it'? ID2:(cont. on KM1:) I think it is also up to the language whether `a cup' can mean `a cupful' -- whether you may name the vessel and mean the content. This kind of thing, too, ought to be mentioned in books. KM2: Same point. ID1:(on MR2, written before KM1 comments above) Does this imply that they are up to the language? I thought presuppositions and conversational implicatures were the same, no matter whether one spoke Esperanto or English. Counterexamples? MR5:(on the above ID1 and ID2, ID3, KM1, KM2 which followed): In the case of "know", I agree with you. If _scii_ didn't assume the truth of the complement, it couldn't be translated "know". I was quite surprised by Ken's claim that Esperanto has *no* presuppositions etc. ID5: Yes, that's exactly the point that I've been struggling to make. MR5: But I doubt that all languages have the *same* presuppositions and conversational implicatures. ID5: I'm not convinced the other way either, it was rather the example with "know" vs "scii" which led me to make this generalisation. MR5: I'd recommend Anna Wierzbicka's _Cross-cultural pragmatics_ here; whether or not you like her theories or notation, the pragmatic facts are fascinating. Examples? How about the French and English exchanges --Voulez-vous du cafe? 'Do you want some coffee?' --Merci. 'Thank you.' Presumably _Merci_ and _Thank you_ mean the same thing, but the pragmatics differ: the French speaker is declining the offer, the English speaker is accepting it. I believe it's been alleged that Grice's rules are culturally variable. For instance, "Be relevant" and "Be truthful" may be rules in Anglo-Saxon culture; in some Oriental cultures it'd be "Say what the listener wants to hear" instead. ID5: Hmm. Yes, conversational implicatures can be a strange thing; a culture may be responsible for a message conveying the exact opposite meaning of what its semantic content appears to be. The only cure is, of course, to keep this kind of thing out of a planned language. People certainly can learn not to accept or decline offers by just giving thanks. That's even further away from syntactic complexity, though. MR6: Which from the point of view of an English or French speaker would increase the complexity of the language's pragmatics... Has the Esperanto movement come up with any pragmatic rules for Esperanto speakers? --that is, any rule that's both pragmatic and something all or most members of the movement can't simply import from their native languages? KM5:(on ID5) Grice based his conception of conversational implicature on the fundamental assumption that users of a language are "cooperative." It has, as Mark suggests, become questionable whether this idea can be interpreted in a universally valid way. The Keenans have done some early spadework on Malagasy (there's a nice sketch in one of Tim Shopen's collections, either _Languages and Their Speakers_ or _Languages and Their Status_, I'm not sure which one) which suggests that either "cooperative" means different things in different cultures, or cultures have different principles governing implicatures. Brown and Levinson's politeness theory has to my mind shed a great deal of light on the issue, by showing that the reason we communicate so much by implicature and by indirect speech acts is that directness and abruptness is (universally, they would say) impolite. (Their theory is built on face effects from Goffman and others.) This is very nice because we are already very much aware of cultural differences with regard to politeness (maintaining one's own persona and avoiding affronts to the other guy's). So Brown & Levinson have taken something hard to understand and related it to something we do have some understanding of. SLB1: Of course, that doesn't address whether politeness, either, is universally valued. Work on sex differences in communication has shown that some cultures have blunt, explicit male speech and flowery, indirect female speech, while others have the opposite. Frequently the difference is quite pronounced. In all (available) cases, the male speech pattern is judged to be "better" (i.e., higher status) than the female speech pattern, by both males and females. [This led off into a thread on gender differences in language, most of which had little to do with conlangs.] KM5:(cont.) So: as for keeping this kind of thing out of a planned language, I think it *was* kept out of all of them, or rather, none of it was "put in." Planned languages have all been constructed on the assumption that language is pure encoding/decoding. We now think that much if not most of what is communicated in an utterance (= piece of language in context) is not in the utterance. Users of any one constructed language (Esperanto, say) are bound to share enough culture not to have many problems with pragmatics. But this does *not* mean that these languages "have" implicatures, etc.! The pragmatic effects come from a language interacting with the rest of a culture over a (perhaps long) period of time. MR5: Where does this leave Esperanto? I have no idea. I think only fieldwork among the Esperantists can resolve the question. KM1:(cont. on MR2) Any or all of these inferences would be wrong in a culture that drank coffee out of gourds exclusively, ID2: Not really. The listener would have to interpret your utterance as meaningful and relevant, and the only way to do this would be to imagine your cup full of coffee, even if he only drinks it from gourds. KM1: or that wasn't aware of the undesirable effects of too much coffee, ID2: Which is the culture where a cup in the morning and a cup in the afternoon counts as too much coffee? Anyway, I would count on your intonation and facial expression to infer that you mean you're done with coffee for the day. KM1: or in which if you hold a cup in your hand you have to drink a beverage within 24 hours for good luck. ID2: That's too much speculation, isn't it? Our intuitions become fragile when we strain our imagination too much. KM2: Agreed; but that's just what happens when you confront the crucial data on much of anything in linguistics.