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Re: [lojban] Bringing it about that



At 05:01 AM 04/13/2000 -0400, pycyn@aol.com wrote:
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.

Nora notes that there is a specific place where it is important to raise one sumti out of x2 into x3, and that is where there is are multiple possible motivees amongst the places of x2. She used the example "Fred motivates (lenu) Rick kissing Alice" and the choice of x3 might indicate whether it was Rick, Alice, or both who were motivated into that x2 event.

Nora thus agrees with me that mukti is like gasnu and zukte. In particular, mukti is talking about the motives for someone, presumably the agent, of the event x2. But x2 may be an event wherein it is not necessarily clear who the agent is, and thus it fits the pattern of gasnu and zukte in which the explicit raising is to identify the filler of the agentive role, a role that does not exist in all predicates, and which is semantically ambiguous in others (such as cinba and gletu).

lojbab

----
lojbab lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
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