From snark!cowan@GVLS1.VFL.PARAMAX.COM Ukn Aug 3 22:36:14 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 3 Aug 1993 22:36:13 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 9676; Tue, 03 Aug 93 22:35:05 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 9924; Tue, 03 Aug 93 22:36:38 EDT Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1993 14:06:59 EDT Reply-To: John Cowan Sender: Lojban list From: John Cowan Subject: Cowan on deixis X-To: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: Erik Rauch Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: :0a Since the preceding messages are a confused mess of proposals and retractions and over-complex examples, I will attempt to write from scratch what I think the story is. Meta-note on direct quotation: Lojban direct quotation with "lu...li'u" or "lo'u...le'u" represents what the quotee said, and so ignores all consideration of the quoter. Some of Nick's examples translated English indirect discourse with Lojban direct quotation, leading to confusion. Temporal deixis: Absolute. All tenses in Lojban refer to the current space-time reference, which is the speaker's unless reset. So: ko'a pu cusku le se du'u ko'a ca klama le zarci means that she said (in the past) that she was going to go (in the speaker's present) to the store. With a clever use of "ki", we can change to relative deixis: ko'a puki cusku le se du'u ko'a ca klama le zarci has "ki" locking in the "pu", which causes the later "ca" to be interpreted as "puca" which is just "pu" (given the aorist nature of pu/ca/ba). We could turn off the "ki" for later sentences by appending "kei kiku" to the above. (At this point, jimc will start making remarks about stacks. I will confine myself to the observation that human beings don't have very deep ones.) Personal deixis: Absolute. ko'a cusku le se du'u mi klama le zarci means that she said I went to the store, as in English. (I heard a claim once that Esperanto has relative deixis in this situation: that "John said that I went to the store", literally translated, comes out meaning that John said John went to the store. I couldn't get this confirmed: is it really true?) Epistemic deixis: Relative, in my opinion. I, of course, absolutely deny that "kau" means "(known!)" or anything like it; it refers to identity, not knowledge. la djan. te preti la djim. le se du'u la .an. klama le zarci mu'i makau John is-the-questioner of-Jim on-the statement-that Ann goes to-the market with-motive what? [indirect] means "John asked Jim why Ann went to the store", and says nothing about the state of knowledge of John, Jim, Ann, or the speaker. Note that I don't believe "cpedu" is relevant to questions; it means "ask for", not "ask". I think the fact that "kau" belongs to UI is irrelevant. While it is true that the attitudinal members of UI are absolute, that does not apply to all members. For instance, la .an. cusku lo'u ko'a du ko'e du ko'i le'u na'i Ann said [opaque-quote] X is Y is Z [unquote] [bogus!] the >judgment< of metalinguistic error is made by the speaker, but the error itself is attributed to Ann. Note that "lo'u", glossed "[opaque-quote]" here, does not itself reflect an error, as earlier documents implied; it may be used for quoting fragments of errorless discourse that are not by themselves grammatical: ko basygau lo'u me le le'u lo'u me lo le'u Replace "me le" with "me lo". If somebody wanted to bother, a far more restrictive grammar could be defined for "kau", putting it in its own KAU selma'o. (The natural places would be: after KOhA, after GOhA, after any kind of logical/non-logical connective, after a quantifier, after a lerfu string, after FA or tag, and after "xu" and "pei", which would have to be split from UI/CAI into a new XU selma'o.) But what's the point? The current over-flexibility works well enough, and allows one to suggest a possible value or range of values. -- John Cowan cowan@snark.thyrsus.com ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan e'osai ko sarji la lojban.