Re: GLI Re: Indirect questions

[John Cowan <cowan@locke.ccil.org>]

la .and. cusku di'e

> 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.

Remember that "la'e" is rather broad: it maps a reference to its
referent.  It is already established that la'e zoi .gy. The Red
Pony .gy. cu cukta, for example.  Here the referent of the words
is a certain book, not simply the meaning of those words.

> 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).

Indeed, "kau" makes no sense except within a NU-bridi, and only
for certain members of NU at that, of which "du'u" is the most
prominent.  There may, I say may, be others, notably "ka",
since "du'u" is closely related to "ka".  In any event, sumti
based on NU-bridi make little sense for many selbri (or, more
simply and Quinishly, lead to false bridi:  le nu mi nanmu cu
gerku is simply false, not meaningless, not a category mistake).
 
> 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:

Doubtless then "la djan. cusku le se du'u ma kau klama le zarci"
means that John said who went to the store, which seems good to me.

> 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.

That is too weak, or "John said that 2+2=4" would be a fair
report of John saying that 4+4=8, since "2+2=4" and "4+4=8"
are truth-conditionally equivalent.  Or do you mean something
different by "a truth-conditional equivalent"?
 
> (I hope
> that a discovery of the regularity is waiting over the horizon.)

Amen.

-- 
John Cowan	http://www.ccil.org/~cowan		cowan@ccil.org
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban

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la .and. cusku di'e

> BTW, use of subordinate interrogatives is cross-linguistically
> pretty widespread. Which would follow, if, as I contend,
> main clause interrogatives are semantically a subtype of the
> subordinate variety.

Indeed.  I did an enquiry on Linguist List once to find out about this,
specifically with regard to Y/N indirect questions.  IIRC, only
Turkish was anomalous, using Chinese-style "V-not-V"
questions in indirect form, but not in direct form.  In addition,
some languages simply do not distinguish between "knows whether"
and "knows that" nuances.

> Is the English text of Saki available online? I'd be willing to
> take a look.

It is at http://www.iptweb.com/www/lib/openwin.html .  A hasty
glance shows five indirect questions: three "whether"s, a "why",
and a "who".  The Athelstan translation shows pretty uniformly
"le nu" in circumstances that would call for "le du'u" today.

One case is particularly telling:

        se lakne lenu do kucli lenu mu'i ma mi'a rinka lenu leva
        canko cu ranji le kalri kei le mela aktobr. lecysoltei

representing the original

        You may wonder why we keep that window wide open on an
        October afternoon.

It is clear that Athelstan, not having either "kau" or "du'u"
available, simply used "lenu mu'i ma" to render the English word "why"
without regard to the lack of a direct question here.  Merely
changing the second "nu" to "du'u" and "ma" to "ma kau" (as well
as "mi'a" to "tu'a mi'a" or "rinka" to "gasnu" to avoid the
sumti raising) would make this sentence good 1997 Lojban.

> > knowledge of the value of the sumti, or desire to notexpress it at
>                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > I am curious as to how non-SAE languages deal with these things.
>                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > tell us how many
>           ^^^^^^^^

I grant that your first example can be *derived* from an underlying
indirect question, but to actually *call* it an indirect question
strikes me as over the top.

--
John Cowan      http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              cowan@ccil.org
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban