From a.rosta@ntlworld.com Mon Aug 13 18:16:27 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@ntlworld.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 14 Aug 2001 01:16:27 -0000 Received: (qmail 98654 invoked from network); 14 Aug 2001 01:16:26 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l8.egroups.com with QMQP; 14 Aug 2001 01:16:26 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mta05-svc.ntlworld.com) (62.253.162.45) by mta2 with SMTP; 14 Aug 2001 01:16:25 -0000 Received: from andrew ([62.255.40.56]) by mta05-svc.ntlworld.com (InterMail vM.4.01.03.00 201-229-121) with SMTP id <20010814011624.MSMI20588.mta05-svc.ntlworld.com@andrew> for ; Tue, 14 Aug 2001 02:16:24 +0100 To: Subject: RE: [lojban] Another preliminary note on Indirect Questions Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 02:14:42 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 In-Reply-To: From: "And Rosta" X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 9570 pc: > a.rosta@ntlworld.com writes: > They are, grammatically, interrogative clauses. And we have been rendering > them into Lojban using Q-kau. > > This is part, at least, of the point at issue; they are clauses, perhaps, but > seem to have no connection to interrogatives except the WH words, which are > used for all sorts of things. In order to save debating time, and to save me the effort of justifying my claim, are you willing to take my word for it that on syntactic and semantic grounds wh-clauses clearly divide up into relative and interrogative clauses (the clarity not extending to the analysis of wh-ever clauses)? I am willing to grant you that not all interrogative clauses identified by grammatical criteria deserve to be called interrogative clauses by etymological criteria (i.e. not all have anything to do with any sense of asking questions). > To be sure, some relations are beginning to > emerge, but it seems a mistake to assume that there is going to be one answer > that will fit all these cases. It seems better to deal with the various > cases and then see if anything ties them together. I'm not sure if you're talking about how to analyse their logic, or how to provisionally say them in Lojban. Certainly we have to analyse them on a case by case basis. And until we have a better way of lojbanning each case, Q-kau serves as a stopgap solution. As I've said in another message, I do believe that there will be one answer that will fit all these cases. But regardless of this, I think it's right that Jorge and I have been raising the hard cases, since these are precisely the ones that have resisted previous analysis, unlike the knowing/wondering cases. > <> In fact, each of the "questions" seems to be a roundabout way of saying > > "height," a different category altogether. > > Not a different category altogether. "He knows my height", "He asked my > height", "He decided (on) the height of the hatstand he was making" -- > here "height" is a covert interrogative (as in "He asked the time"), as > it would be in the examples above.> > > Sorry, I don't see it. "He asked my height" is interrogative because of > "ask;" the others don't seem to have any interrogative element at all. The > may share a certain vagueness, ranginess, using a cover word for a specific > (though the question one does not have that feature), but what has that to do > with questions (I have an answer, of course, but, since I don't know how it > works, I'll leave the question stand). What they have to do with questions is that they. along with questions, all share this 'ranginess', and it is this ranginess that characterizes interrogative clauses in English. "Covert interrogative" means "Covert ranginess expressor". I don't mind if we start talking about ranginess rather than interrogativity, if this terminological shift helps to avoid misunderstanding. > <> And using that notion does point to the usual > > tale that questions are in some way the set of answers. The details -- and > > especially the grammatical ones -- need a lot of working out, but perhaps > > the fundamental unity is there. Until it is, I think we should lay off the > > "question" part for clarity. > > I don't understand that last sentence.> > > As I said, I think we should treat these as different things -- and > especially not get hung up on the question cases -- until we have some > evidence of a connection among them and how they fit in. We have cases of > generalizing one kind of item into others that look somehow the same, but not > in any explained way, and we have ended up with muddled and befuddling > categories (tense, e.g.). It sounds like we're in agreement then. We concentrate on depending on the weather, on apparel varying, on changing one's name, and so on. Come back to wondering later. --And.