From: nsn@vis.mu.oz.au (Nick NICHOLAS)
Message-Id: <199407281211.4236@krang.vis.mu.OZ.AU>
Subject: Re: ciska bai tu'a zo bai
To: lojbab@access.digex.net
Date: Thu, 28 Jul 1994 22:11:42 +1000 (EST)
Cc: lojban@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu (Lojban Mailing List),
        nsn@vis.mu.oz.au (Nick NICHOLAS)
In-Reply-To: <199407251504.15467@krang.vis.mu.OZ.AU> from "Logical Language Group" at Jul 25, 94 11:01:17 am
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Hu'tegh! nuq ja' Logical Language Group jay'?

[types of honorifics]

=> absolute: (eg. emperor pronouns; gender pronouns)
=Is this really absolute?  How does the emperor refer to his deceased
=ancestor: with a god pronoun?  What about other emperors?

Well, I guess we'd have to ask Akihito ;) . This is how Levinson talks about
them:

"The other main kind of socially deictic information that is often encoded is
*absolute* rather than relational. There are, for example, forms reserved
for certain speakers, in which case we make talk (after Fillmore 1975) of
*authorized speakers*. For example, in Thai the morpheme *khra'b* is a polite
particle that can only be used by male speakers, the corresponding form 
reserved for female speakers being *kha'*. Similarly, there is a form of the
first person pronoun specifically reserved for the use of the Japanese
Emperor. There are also in many languages forms reserved for *authorised
recipients*, including restrictions on most titles of address (*Your Honour*,
*Mr President*, etc.); in Tunica there were pronouns that differed not only
with sex of referent, but also with the sex of the addressee, so that there
were, for example, two words for 'they', depending on whether one was speaking
to a man or a woman."

=I think in the realm of attitudinals proper, this distinction is unreal.
=You do not >know< that someone else is angry; you infer it from your
=observation (za'a.o'onaidai) or your intuition (se'o.o'onaidai).

I suspect this will have to be suspended somehow in narrative, given the
'omniscient narrator' device --- in the same way as narrative time overrides
our normal way of using tense. I believe Lojbab already adumbrated this point.

=> mean... that you're honouring the sentence.
=Not quite: you are honoring the >referent< of the sentence: as you say,
=we have >referent< honorifics.  So you are honoring an event.  This probably
=makes more sense with "ga'i":
=        le xarju cu citka vauga'i
=        The pig ate [which is an event beneath my notice].

Wow. I get it now. Please include this in the attitudinals paper!

-- 
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<
Nick Nicholas. Linguistics, University of Melbourne.   nsn@krang.vis.mu.oz.au  
        nsn@mundil.cs.mu.oz.au      nick_nicholas@muwayf.unimelb.edu.au
            AND MOVING SOON TO: nnich@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au