From ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK Ukn Aug 3 13:34:12 1993 Received: from YALEVM.YCC.YALE.EDU by MINERVA.CIS.YALE.EDU via SMTP; Tue, 3 Aug 1993 13:34:08 -0400 Received: from CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU by YaleVM.YCC.Yale.Edu (IBM VM SMTP V2R2) with BSMTP id 7145; Tue, 03 Aug 93 13:32:59 EDT Received: from CUVMB.COLUMBIA.EDU by CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU (Mailer R2.07) with BSMTP id 4628; Tue, 03 Aug 93 13:29:05 EDT Date: Tue, 3 Aug 1993 18:25:23 +0100 Reply-To: ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK Sender: Lojban list From: Mr Andrew Rosta Subject: Re: Discourse Analysis & Pragmatics X-To: lojban@cuvma.BITNET, Nick Nicholas To: Erik Rauch In-Reply-To: (Your message of Tue, 03 Aug 93 10:04:07 W.) <9308030006.AA63423@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk> Status: RO X-Status: Message-ID: Nick says: > Not that this is that constructive a comment; but I've been studying the latte r > this semester, and the former last semester, and am continuously amused by > the way in which Lojban development has neglected these fields of linguistics, > and so finds itself confounded by them. The whole tense issue, for example, > is an issue of temporal deixis relativisation, snugly part of pragmatics. The > applicability of Gricean maxims to Lojban is another issue which occasionally > gets raised (thence the goat's legs debate). There is good reason for the > language designers to be reticent to prescribe something as fluid as > pragmatics, it's obvious that some leading-the-way has to be done from time > to time, and I do hope Lojbanists out there read more pragmatics texts > alongside their Quine. I take the opposite view: pragmatics should be outsidethe scope of what is designed for an auxiliary language, and instead left to usage. In the rare cases where pragmatic prescriptions are made, they are undesirable & probably futile. An example is the assertion that in Lojban "Do you know where the toilet is" is not to be taken as a request to be directed to the toilet. The language specifies the literal meaning of the utterance, & but is up to the hearer to decide what the speaker is trying to communicate & to react accordingly. The same goes for the goat's legs: the grammar specifies that "the goat has 2 legs" means "the goat has only 2 legs". However, if the speaker says "the goat has 2 legs", the hearer may understand the speaker to be intending to communicate "the goat has at least 2 legs", if the context strongly supports this conclusion on the hearer's part. ---- And least 2 legs" if context