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Re: [lojban] The new approach to attitudinals



At 10:21 PM 06/10/2001 -0400, Invent Yourself wrote:
Without .a'o the sentence is an assertion about reality. With .a'o, under
the new proposal, the sentence is an assertion about the speaker's hopes.
That is what he is calling a change in the truth value, I believe.

I don't think that a sentence should ever be "about" the attitude expressed by an attached attitudinal. A sentence is always "about" the bridi in some way, and the attitudinal is in someway expressing the speaker's attitude concerning the bridi. If you want to talk about the attitude, use cinmo or a selbri word pertaining directly to the attitude.

a'o and other attitudes may change the pragmatics so that we interpret the tense/aspect on an untensed bridi differently. In the case of a'o in potential-world situations, it tends to suggest the potential-but-not-actual (nu'o) aspect, whereas some of the other attitudinals suggest a can-and-has (pu'i) aspect.

Don't spoil the attitudinals by making them the focus of the sentence.

lojbab
--
lojbab                                             lojbab@lojban.org
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
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Artificial language Loglan/Lojban:                 http://www.lojban.org