From LOJBAN%CUVMB.bitnet@YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU Sat Mar 6 22:52:12 2010 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 27 Apr 1993 10:18:36 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 1786; Tue, 27 Apr 93 10:18:00 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4338; Tue, 27 Apr 93 10:17:41 EST Date: Mon, 26 Apr 1993 23:05:33 -0400 Reply-To: Logical Language Group Sender: Lojban list From: Logical Language Group Subject: Esperanto on sci.lang pt 2 of 4 X-To: conlang@diku.dk, lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch X-From-Space-Date: Mon Apr 26 19:05:33 1993 X-From-Space-Address: @YaleVM.YCC.YALE.EDU:LOJBAN@CUVMB.BITNET Message-ID: Complexity of Esperanto Syntax Pt 2 of 4 MR2:(cont.) * Clause-mate reflexivization. Compare Li ordonis al la servisto vesti lin 'He ordered the servant to dress him' Li ordonis al la servisto vesti sin '...to dress himself' Obviously Esperanto reflexivization is as dependent on clause structure as it is in English. (But are the rules exactly the same?) DH2: Almost certainly not. (My own language-usage uses the infinitive a lot less, in favor of the "ke -u" structure; hence "Li ordonis, ke la servisto vestu lin" vs. "Li ordonis, ke la servisto vestu sin".) ID1: For what it's worth, Russian distinguishes between _On prikazal sluge odet' sebja_. (the servant is to dress the orderer) _On prikazal sluge odet'sja._ (the servant is to dress himself) This despite the fact that _odet'sja_ < _odet' sebja_. Not sure if Polish works in the same way (and Esperanto has roots in both of these). MR5: Actually it looks like Esperanto agrees with English here, and disagrees with Russian. ID5: Yes. MR5: _sebja_ ~= _sin_, n'est-ce pas? ID5: _sebja_ est l'accusatif du pronom re'flexif, c'est-a`-dire plus ou moins la me^me chose que "sin". Mais ci-dessus _sebja_ indique le mai^tre, alors que "sin" indique le valet. MR2: * Conjunction reduction. Can one say Kristo dormis kaj liaj sekvantoj. 'Christ slept and his servants.' What reductions are possible and not possible? * Copula reduction. One can say Mi farbos la muron blua. 'I will paint the wall blue.' but what about Mi volas la muron blua. 'I want the wall blue.' Mi kredas la muron blua. '*I believe the wall blue.' DH2: All are used. ID1: Another interesting question is why it is _blua_ rather than _bluan_. (I'm extrapolating from Russian again.) PJ1: Mi farbos la muron bluan = I will paint the blue wall Mi farbos la muron (tiel ke g^i ig^u) blua = I will paint the wall (so that it becomes) blue MR2:(cont.) * The verbal system. Like Spanish or English, Esperanto has a mixed verbal system, making use of both auxiliaries and inflections. _Esti_ is used to form both passives and progressives: La shipo estas chirkauita de akvo. 'The ship is surrounded by water.' Li estis dirinta kelkajn vortojn. 'He had been saying a few words.' One must learn which verbs are inherently transitive (e.g. _movi_ 'move'), requiring inflection for intransitive meanings (_movighi_), and which are intransitive (e.g. _sidi_ 'sit'), with a derived transitive (_sidigi_). DH2: Yes, but this is a lexical, not a syntactic, question. Transitivity and intransitivity are inherent in the meanings of the words. Problems with transitivity/intransitivity seem to arise in general because most people learn Esperanto as a second language and absorb the semantic content of its words in terms of the semantic content of similar words in their own language. As William Auld once pointed out, "If you learn that _droni_ means 'to drown,' you are going to be confused; but if you learn that it means _sufokighi en akvo_, you'll have no problems." MR2:(cont.) Imperfect tenses are produced with yet another inflection (_movadis_ 'was moving, often moved, etc.'). DH2: To us, this is not an imperfect tense of "movi" but a past tense of "movadi," which is a different word from "movi". MR2: The sequence of tenses in dependent clauses is a bit odd for English speakers: Li diris, ke li faris [past] ghin. 'He said he had done it.' Li insistis, ke mi faru [imperative!] tion. 'He insisted that I do it.' DH2: But actually more understandable: in Esperanto indirect discourse, ", ke X" is an exact replacement for the direct ": 'X'", whereas the English rules, like the Latin ones, are somewhat more complicated. ID1: Since English speakers speak a very odd language, it is to be expected that anything simple and sensible will sound a bit odd to them. :-) In this case Esperanto once again patterns with Slavic, as well as with such languages as Japanese, whose syntaxes are free of the abomination known as coordination of tenses. MR2:(cont.) Again, it would be interesting to know what restrictions occur on these processes. Some English sentences don't passivize, for instance. Can you say "La pilko estas havata de mi" ('*The ball is had by me')? DH2: Yeahp. In fact, we can say it in English, too; we just _don't_. Maybe in a few hundred years Esperanto will also have modes of expression which are syntactically legal but are simply not used for reasons of habit. MR2: * Presuppositions. Presumably Mi scias ke Paulo mortighis. 'I know that Paul is dead.' implies that Paul is dead. I'd be surprised if presuppositions, conversational implicatures, speech acts, were any less complex in Esperanto than in English. DH2: Probably not. KM1:(on MR2) With all due respect (and BTW it's nice to know that there are Esperantists now who are aware of pragmatics; MR3: I was a teenage Esperantist; KM3: Me too; 'course that's not all I was a teenage. Luckily, I studied other languages, which was why I learned E very well. MR3: but in later years I'm afraid my loyalty shifted to other languages and other causes... KM3: Truth is, there are plenty of people around who know the language but don't have movement loyalties. Maybe we need a support group <:-> KM1:(cont. on MR2) I hope it's spreading <:->), the sentence above can't possibly make any sense. It's possible that I'm misinterpreting you here, but note that a constructed language doesn't "have" presuppositions, implicatures, and speech acts because these notions have to do with the extent to which interpretations of utterances in context follow from the shared belief-worlds of speaker and hearer, i.e., culture. ID2:(on KM1) You are misinterpreting him. The example he gave was (more or less) `Mi scias ke _P_.' --> `_P_.' `I know that _P_.' --> `_P_.' (For `-->' read `presupposes'.) I already expressed my feeling that the presupposition in this case is extralinguistical; in so far as "scii" means `know', the presupposition has to be there. You can't say someone knows something that is not true, no matter in what language. KM2: As I suggested in my original post, the jury is still out, to say the least, on presuppositions, so I'll say nothing more about this example, except that since presuppositions are linked to specific linguistic expressions (their "triggers"), absolutely nothing that I know of prevents a language from having a verb that means what 'know' means but is not factive. Ditto for 'regret,' 'admit' and all the other ones. But the issue here is whether presuppositions depend in some way on the shared belief-world of the language users, and until we know what presuppositions are, I don't think we can approach that question. (The problem, for those interested, is that presuppositions can't be what they have been thought to be -- propositions taken for granted mutually by speaker and hearer at the time the utterance containing the presupposition trigger is performed -- because they can be used to introduce new information. For example We regret that the meeting has been cancelled. is supposed to presuppose (like 'know' in the other example) the truth of its complement; but this sentence can be used to inform someone who didn't already know it, that the meeting had been cancelled. Similarly Sorry I'm late; my children spilled milk on me. is supposed to presuppose (via existential presupposition) that the speaker had children; but the sentence could be used to inform someone who didn't already know it that the speaker had children. So: in view of this, Georgia Green (in _Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding_) proposes that presuppositions are taken for granted only by the speaker. Fine? No, because then I do not see the difference between asserting and presupposing.) ID3: "think", "believe", "suppose" or something. That is, for me the factivity of "know" is an essential part of its semantics. KM4: The standard doctrine is that the presuppositions triggered by a lexical item can't be part of its semantics, i.e. part of its lexical meaning, because (a) lexical meaning is affected by negation while presuppositions aren't (e.g., both "John knows that tea is free" and "John doesn't know that tea is free" presuppose "tea is free") ID4: That would lead me to the thought that lexical meaning has a part which is affected by negation and a part which isn't, so that negation is akin to the operation defined on complex numbers (whatever it may be called in English) which inverts the sign of the imaginary part (what you call the lexical meaning) but leaves the real part (the presuppositions) as is. KM4: and (b) presuppositions can be suspended, as in "Tea may be free, though I don't know that it is" (but not denied, of course, as in "*I know that tea is free, but it isn't"), while things that clearly are part of lexical meaning can't be suspended, as in "*Bill may be dead, since Henry killed him." ID4: Isn't this a different "know" we're dealing with here? One that means `be certain of' as opposed to `be aware of'? What makes me wonder about this is that you can't do this with the Russian _znat'_, say, which means that there ought to be separate entries in a bilingual dictionary. KM3:(on KM1 and MR3 response below:) Note emphasis on *have* in the above; I think your comments immediately below miss that. I was trying to emphasize that a language doesn't "have" a pragmatics in the sense that it "has" grammatical features. (Whence my reluctance to get into this: there are linguists who still try to account for some pragmatic phenomena semantically, and for them, what I just said would not necessarily hold.) MR5: Hmm, then what *does* "have" pragmatics? I suppose the most reasonable answer is "the culture". However, I don't think this leaves the divisions between "language" and "pragmatics" airtight; after all, language is an expression of culture. For example, English has scores of questions with the force of requests-- "Could you get me a drink?" "Can I bother you for the time?" "Do you suppose you could turn that thing down?" "Would you be willing to wait?" Wierzbicka tells us that such sentences would sound quite strange-- and more to the point, wouldn't always accomplish their intent-- if translated into Polish. She argues that such questions support the values and goals of Anglo-American *culture* (e.g. respect for others' individuality, avoidance of being seen to impose). So is this culture or language? On the one hand the values expressed and the desire to express them are cultural. On the other hand the language itself provides the means to gratify those desires. I suppose Esperanto would not have developed constructions, such as English indirect imperatives, or the Polish system of diminutives, or the "formal" forms of verbs in Japanese, keyed to the values or practices of specific cultures. It would be interesting to know if it's developed or even adopted *any* pragmatic constructions that are not simply common to all the European languages.