An approach to attitudinals

["Jorge Llambias" <jjllambias@hotmail.com>]

It is clear that atitudinals are not used to make claims.
If I say "ui" I am not claiming that I am happy, I am simply
showing you that I am happy. A big smile might accomplish the
same thing. They are not claims.

But that in no way means that I can remove the attitudinals from
a bridi and that what is left is something that I am asserting.
Sometimes this is how it works, sometimes it isn't.

For example, in {ui la djan pu klama le zarci} I am claiming that
John went to the market, and I am expressing happiness about that
fact. But in {a'o la djan pu klama le zarci} I am not claiming
that John went to the market. I can't hope for something that
I know is true, {a'o} requires that I don't know that the statement
is true, and also that I don't know it to be false either. If the
bridi is to be taken as a claim, it is not about the actual world
but about the world as I want it to be, a world that has to be
compatible with what I know of the real world. On the other hand,
{mi pacna le nu la djan klama le zarci} is a claim about the real
world.

{au} is more permissive than {a'o}. Again the statement can't be
known to be true, you can't wish for something you already have!
But in this case it _can_ be known to be false, because you can
wish things were different than what they in fact are:
{au la djan pu klama le zarci} "I wish John had gone to the market".
In this case it is suggested (if not actually claimed) that John
did not go to the market, for if I didn't know whether or not he
went I could have used {a'o} instead of {au}. To make the actual
claim I would have to say {oi la djan na pu klama le zarci}.

So, some attitudinals do not remove the assertiveness of the bridi
which they adorn: ui, ua, ue, u'e, u'i, ia, ie, ii, oi, o'i, o'a
are all in this category.

Some attitudinals require that the speaker doesn't know the
bridi to be true: a'o, au, ai, ei, e'o, e'u, e'e, e'a are all
in this category. In these cases, the bridi is not a claim about
the real world. It is rather a claim about the speaker's inernal
world, and the speaker must necessarily not know that the claim
be true of the real world.

For some attitudinals, I am not quite sure about their meaning yet,
so I can't tell which category they belong to.

mu'o mi'e xorxes


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