Robin Lee Powell wrote: > I'm not sure how that's different; the author is expressing an
opinion about what was said.
I would define it assei marks a bridi which expresses a claim at the metalinguistic level about the utterance in which the sei clause is embedded. Such a claim usually is information about the circumstances under which the utterance was made, which could include identification of the speaker/author, the circumstances under which the speaker/author expressed the utterance, or some discursive relation (cf selma'o UI discursives) or emotional state (cf selma'o UI attitudinals) of the speaker/author.
The truth value of the metalinguistic bridi is distinct from that of the utterance in which it is embedded (i.e. it is possible for the SEI clause to be false while the bridi it is embedded in is true).
--------------I would suggest that someone look at and use (possibly needing corrections of vocabulary) at Athelstan's translation of Saki's _Open Window_ which I believe was the text that originally required the existence of SEI. IIRC, there is a lot of conversation in the story, and there are several examples of embedded information in the quotes, about the speaker's actions or expressions while saying whatever was being said.
The other use of SEI, IIRC (I think this is se'i) , is for editorial correction - used when editorially inserting a paraphrase or a "sic" comment in a quoted text and setting that comment apart from the text in which it appears. In English, this is typically expressed using square brackets inside the quote, whereas the metalinguistic comments a la "sei" are expressed by dropping out of the quote, inserting the comment, and then reentering the quote.
If a se'i paraphrase is too long to be expressed in a bridi, or cannot be grammatically expressed in a bridi, we intended the se'i to be followed by a to/toi inside the SEI scope so that it is known that the parenthetical is not part of the quote). This might require the use of a dummy selbri in order to make the SEI insertion grammatical.
Note that normal usage of SEI inside a quotation also uses "sa'a" so as to mark that the SEI clause itself should be considered "invisible". This was concocted for the rare case of quoting a text which has an embedded SEI clause in it, which clause is itself part of the quote, and not a comment on the quote.
lojbab