From sentto-44114-2373-mark=kli.org@returns.onelist.com Thu Apr 13 08:00:46 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: shoulson-kli@meson.org Received: (qmail 16320 invoked from network); 13 Apr 2000 08:00:45 -0000 Received: from zash.lupine.org (205.186.156.18) by pi.meson.org with SMTP; 13 Apr 2000 08:00:45 -0000 Received: (qmail 18194 invoked by uid 40001); 13 Apr 2000 09:01:49 -0000 Delivered-To: kli-mark@kli.org Received: (qmail 18191 invoked from network); 13 Apr 2000 09:01:49 -0000 Received: from hk.egroups.com (208.50.144.91) by zash.lupine.org with SMTP; 13 Apr 2000 09:01:49 -0000 X-eGroups-Return: sentto-44114-2373-mark=kli.org@returns.onelist.com Received: from [10.1.10.35] by hk.egroups.com with NNFMP; 13 Apr 2000 09:01:48 -0000 Received: (qmail 28964 invoked from network); 13 Apr 2000 09:01:48 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m1.onelist.org with QMQP; 13 Apr 2000 09:01:48 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO imo-d03.mx.aol.com) (205.188.157.35) by mta1 with SMTP; 13 Apr 2000 09:01:47 -0000 Received: from Pycyn@aol.com by imo-d03.mx.aol.com (mail_out_v25.3.) id h.d9.2ca6b75 (3892) for ; Thu, 13 Apr 2000 05:01:40 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: To: lojban@onelist.com X-Mailer: AOL 4.0 for Windows sub 33 MIME-Version: 1.0 Mailing-List: list lojban@egroups.com; contact lojban-owner@egroups.com Delivered-To: mailing list lojban@egroups.com Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 05:01:39 EDT X-eGroups-From: Pycyn@aol.com From: pycyn@aol.com Subject: [lojban] Bringing it about that Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit (This started as a RECORD of a thread from Robin's lessons, but even I have noticed that some of those records laready have gone beyond reporting to express my views or ask further questions, so I'm trying to clean up the act by overtly going back to problems that seem incompletely dealt with -- either thr question has not been asked, or it has not been answered or, I admit, I don't like the answer given.) The start is to Lojban "John made me hit him," which is pretty vague in English and Lojban lacks an equally vague form, requiring a choice among mukti (motivate -- whatever that is going to mean exactly), rinka (cause -- apparently taken as a physical connection -- one suggestion was that John could only rinka it by taking my hand and hitting himself with it -- even electrode tricks are suspect), and some others which I either forget or don't clearly understand (necessitate?). And gasnu, agent. The focus was on, first, getting to John, since the causal words seem to require (quite rightly) events in both the cause and the effect places. That meant that "John" had to be subject raised in the subject position, a slightly odd case. And once it was entered, a deeper problem arose: if "John" had to be raised from, say, "John's laughing made me hit him" to get "John made me...," why doesn't "John's laughing" have to be treated as a raising, since it is presumably something about it that worked the effect "The fact that John's laughing was annoying made me..." And so on, ad inf. The practical solution, that "John" needs to be flagged because it is not an event name in a place that calls for one, seems ad hoc -- one the one hand, John IS an event by many definitions and, on the other hand, the fact that "John" doesn't fit should be marker enough, whereas "John's laughing" might be more misleading. And, of course, if we want to say that what is raised depends upon what the real motivator was, then we have to face the fact that that might be John (not as an event even), not something he did or was, and so the reaising might be inappropriate, even misleading. A second matter was the third place of mukti (and some other of the words in this collection?) event x1 motivates event x2 in volition of x3. Since x2 is presumably an even in which the agent is the one who's volition is involved, x3 repeats the subject of the description in x2, usually at least. These place structures are baselined and immutable until some future date, but we might consider reconsidering these cases at that date. They seem to arise from English (etc., but we know what most of the founding members spoke) expressions A motivates B to do C, which is taken to be a 3-place relation, even though most good grammars of English (etc.) recognize it as only 2-place, the second place being an infinitive sentence "B to do C". Of course, both pieces function separately A motivates B, A motivates Cing: the raised subject and the suppressed subject respectively. At least, until reconsideration, we might well drop the use of the thrid place. And back to the original problem. I used to advocate a predicate "x1 brings it about that event x2 by doing event x3." I now notice that, except rhetorically, this is another case of duplicating the subject of an event description. There is, however, no obvious predicate in Lojban that does this in the properly vague way, so that the original sentence is still untranslatable in its full obscurity. But there does seem to be a tendency to use gasnu in something like this way (or rather something like the original version, but without the third place). This seems to turn up most in lujvo, where rafsi of gasnu turn up finally whenever an activity or process is derived from a state predicate (loosely speaking, since these are not hard concepts in Lojban). Even though literal is not always best in lujvo (since not in tanru) and it is hard to make rules about the semantics of lujvo formation, this tendency is worrisome, given the history of, e.g., madzo (x1 makes x2 out of material x3) in Loglan, where it spread to something very close to "bring it about that" but then also became impersonal, beyond even English "make" and Fr. "faire" and so came to mean very little at all (and nothing that could be traced back within Loglan to its core meaning). pc ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free E-Cards, Screensavers, and Digital Pictures! Corbis.com: http://click.egroups.com/1/3358/2/_/17627/_/955616508/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ To unsubscribe, send mail to lojban-unsubscribe@onelist.com