[lojban] Re: semantic primes can define anything

["Jorge Llambías" <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On 3/27/06, John E Clifford <clifford-j@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> > X often thinks about Y
> > X thinks good things about Y
> >
> > X so'i roi pensi Y
> > X jinvi lo zabna Y
> >
> > The first one does not say that X often has
> > opinions about Y,
> > but that Y is often on X's mind.
>
> But can one have someone on one's mind without
> some proprositional content?

Yes, definitely.

But even if one couldn't (which I don't see why not), one could still
have some propositional content on one's mind without holding it
as an opinion.

> As far as I can see
> -- from a logical point of view, mind you, not
> NSM  -- {jinvi} should not have a third place (it
> creates all kinds of problems and is an artifact
> of English idiom) and {pensi} is then just {jinvi
> tu'a}.  NSM seems to want {jinvi} with the common
> case of dropping the x2.

I disagree that {pensi} is {jinvi tu'a}. I can think (pensi) of pigs flying
without opining (jinvi) that pigs fly.

> > So the sense of {fasnu} would not be prime?
>
> Apparently not.  I don't have cases and the talk
> suggests that it is always "Something happens to
> something," never "Such and such happens"
> (indeed, the grammar for English NSM sentences
> doesn't allow an event noun phrase in place of
> "such and such"; the best one could get would be
> "This happens: such-and-such [as a full
> sentence]" Events tend to be unspecified with
> "happens" anyhow.

So a paraphrase like this would not be allowed:

 Something happens.
 X thinks that this is a good thing.


> > So part of the problem is that they don't
> > manage to explain
> > their primes very well.
>
> Well, of course they are primes so they can't
> officially be explained at all.

They can't be paraphrased in terms of primes, but surely they
can be explained better.

> Still, some more
> examples would be useful.  The only one I have
> actually seen that directly deals with this
> problem is a comment by Uwe Durst in his rebuttal
> article in Theoretical Linguistics 29.3, where he
> selects "He moves (a part of) his body" as giving
> the sense of MOVE in English (presumably the
> volitional twitch, not the "cause to be
> displaced" reading even here).

Ah, I thought MOVE was not meant to be agentive! I thought
it was more like {muvdu}, as in "the ball moves from here to there",
but also (unlike {muvdu}) including movement in place.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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