Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 15:02:40 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <199712112002.PAA29736@locke.ccil.org> Reply-To: And Rosta Sender: Lojban list From: And Rosta Organization: University of Central Lancashire Subject: Re: GLI Re: Indirect questions X-To: LOJBAN@cuvmb.cc.columbia.edu To: John Cowan X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 5175 X-From-Space-Date: Thu Dec 11 15:02:43 1997 X-From-Space-Address: LOJBAN@CUVMB.CC.COLUMBIA.EDU Jorge: > >But my main objection is that the "inherent meaning" is determinate > >and the "noninherent meaning" is indeterminate. > > But what's indeterminate about the meaning under discussion? > Given a context in which the utterance is produced, it will either > be the case that she is sad, or it will be the case that she isn't. > (Or some other value in the middle.) The determinate meaning can be established independently of context. Except for deictics. The step you then want to take involves establishing which world the proposition is asserted to be true of. That's where the indeterminacy comes in. > Now, given that context, > it is perfectly determinate what is {le sedu'u xukau ko'a badri}. > Any {lu ... li'u} that serves to report the fact will do. First, *once we have overcome the indeterminacy of which world the proposition is claimed to be true of*, it is indeed determinate that if {ko`a badri} then {djuno lo du`u xu kau ko`a badri} entails {djuno lo du`u ko`a badri}. Second, my reservations about {le se du`u xu kau} remain. Though see below. > >In English one often gets exchanges like: > > > > A: What are you complaining about? You *asked* me to open the > > window. > > B: No I didn't. I just said it was warm in here. > > > > A: I've known women be better at maths than men. > > B: I strongly disagree that women are better at maths than men. > > > >- based on misunderstandings, which in turn arise from an erroneous > >inference of noninherent meaning from inherent meaning. > > All right, that's not what I had in mind. I meant unequivocal meanings. > Noninherent only in as much as they depend on the context. Somewhat > like deictics. Not like deictics. It is possible to specify the meaning of deictics exactly, but involving variables that are to be bound by properties of the utterance. For nondeictic terms the meaning can be specified completely, without any context-dependency. Your case is less like deixis and more like "She painted the house his favourite colour". If this is true of world W, and in world W his favourite colour is blue, then it is entailed that she painted the house blue. > >Lojban's > >cultural literalism is well-advised, and I think the distinction > >should be carried over to the meaning of {la`e}. > > I agree. I'm not suggesting a deviation from literalism here. OK. But I think your position entails that la`e should include all entailments, given that it is established which world the utterance is talking about. So I think you are in effect arguing that {la`e lu she painted the house his favourite colour} can be the proposition "She painted the house blue". I'm unhappy with that. > >> To those worried about the horribly arcane nature of this discussion, > >> we are trying to decide whether {le sedu'u xukau ko'a badri} makes > >> sense, as in {mi cusku le sedu'u xukau ko'a badri}, which to me > >> means "I say whether she is sad". > > > >My position is that I don't see how it makes sense if we simply > >extrapolate from known cases. But that does not rule out declaring > >this a valid usage. > > I understand {mi cusku le sedu'u ...} to mean what {mi cusku le du'u ...} > would mean if cusku meant "x1 says proposition x2". Am I committing > some blunder that I don't see here? Hardly a blunder, even if I am right and you are wrong. I think it has been established that the effect of Q-kau on the logicosemantic structure varies according to the context of Q-kau within the sentence. That is, the meaning varies according to whether Q-kau occurs within a sumti of djuno, of preti, of cucli, of "discuss" (I forget the gismu - it starts with a C I think), or of frica. (I would LOVE to be proved wrong on this, mind you.) There are certain contexts where Q-kau just doesn't make any sense (e.g. if it occured within a sumti of the majority of gismu). {cusku le se du`u xu kau} is one of those contexts where I hadn't been able to get it to make any sense, though I can accept that by stipulated convention it should mean "say whether". However, I think I now find myself able to rationalize such a convention. {cusku le se du`u xu kau Y} would mean "utter a piece of text that says whether Y is true". Logically, that would be: utter a piece of text, t, such that for every x, a seljetlai of Y, t expresses (a truth-conditional equivalent of) the proposition that x is seljetlai of Y. whereas {cusku le se du`u Y} would be utter a piece of text, t, such that t expresses (a truth-conditional equivalent of) Y. So, in conclusion, I think that {cusku le se du`u xu kau Y} can coherently be ruled to mean "say whether", but that without further investigation, it does not seem as if there is any regularity to the mapping from syntax to semantics. (I hope that a discovery of the regularity is waiting over the horizon.) > ... > >The price of having the unexpanded forms is that they don't > >all expand in the same way. If we required all expansions to > >be automatic (i.e. insensitive to lexical semantics) then > >either {djuno} or {kucli} could not have their current meaning. > > Yes, it would seem that you're right. > > co'o mi'e xorxes --And