From nsn@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au Mon Dec 19 23:37:48 1994 Received: from mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU by nfs2.digex.net with SMTP id AA04114 (5.67b8/IDA-1.5 for ); Mon, 19 Dec 1994 23:37:31 -0500 Received: from speech.linguistics.unimelb.EDU.AU by mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU with SMTP (5.83--+1.3.1+0.50); id AA08309 Tue, 20 Dec 1994 14:49:41 +1100 (from nsn@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au) Received: by speech (5.0) id AA01347; Tue, 20 Dec 1994 14:50:42 --1000 From: nsn@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au (Nick Legend Nicholas) Message-Id: <9412200350.1347@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au> Subject: Re: kau and jai issues To: lojbab@access.digex.net (Logical Language Group) Date: Tue, 20 Dec 1994 14:50:41 +1100 (EST) Cc: jorge@phyast.pitt.edu In-Reply-To: <199412081058.AA05596@access1.digex.net> from "Logical Language Group" at Dec 8, 94 05:58:33 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL23] Content-Type: text Content-Length: 2114 Status: RO Hu'tegh! nuq ja' Logical Language Group jay'? God rest ye merry, gentlemen! I'm on a ten-day hiatus between my thesis binge and my studentship with Microsoft; I've decided to play catch-up with my 4000 outstanding mail messages, although god wot how far I'll get with my Lojban backlog, since, for me to say anything intelligent, I'll have to bone up a lot more on my formal semantics. (I do know a bit on pragmatics --- Levinson's book is a great intro --- but these questions that are coming up, on veridicality and indirect questions, need a lot more formal stuff. My formal semantics textbook has no mention of indirect questions, so this would necessitate a library search, which I'm unlikely to get done in a hurry; I hope pc can do justice to the topic.) On kau, I'll respond later. On jai: =wrt jai, I notice briefly that Nick seems to almost always express agentives =explicitly with jaigau, and indeed almost all of his usages of jai are with =a following tense/modal. This tends to provide usage evidence against the =assumption that normal usage assumes jai is the agentive unless specifically =marked, since tu'a Nick IS normal usage in this matter. (Or is that =Nick jaigau normal usage %^). There is an extremely simple reason you won't find bare jai in my texts: most of them were written *before* bare jai was invented (though, as you'll recall, I was advocating such a converter for a very long time.) I quite strongly suspect that, had I access to bare jai, I *would* use it more often than not for agentives, since it's agentives, after all, that get raised more often than not. Jorge had specific questions on my usage; I'll now answer them. -- @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nick Nicholas. Melbourne University, Aus. nsn@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au --- "Some of the English might say that the Irish orthography is very Irish. Personally, I have a lot of respect for a people who can create something so grotesque." -- Andrew Rosta , <9307262008.AA95951@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk>