Re: [lojban] Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: mi kakne lo bajra

[John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com>]

Raising is always a risky business, because it appears to involve moving items 
from a subordinate, temporary universes of discourse into the main one.  If I 
say "I want for me to ride a unicorn", say, I am not at all put off by the 
objection "There are no unicorns" because the unicorn I want is buried in a pair 
of worlds which pertain to two different counterfactual conditonals and so have 
nothing to the universe of present discourse.  If I say, on the other hand 
(assuming English is something like a logical language :)), "I want a unicorn 
for me to ride", I seem to be saying that there are unicorns (in the present 
domain) and I want one of them to ride. The claim that there aren't any is then 
false, even though the interlocutor has believed it true and has not agreed to 
an expansion, as required by the rules of conversation.  Indeed, his remark 
might well be a reminder that the universe of the dialog does not encompass 
unicorns (whatever may happen in wish-worlds and the like). Further, the new 
form implies that there is a unicorn I want to ride and that, even in the 
expanded domain, is false, since no one unicorn is singled out by my desire, but 
rather any one will do.  There are other problems, about the laws of identity 
and the like that this move can give rise to.  So, as a general rule, don't 
raise unless you are sure the referent of what you raise is already set up to be 
talked about.
----- Original Message ----
From: Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sat, October 30, 2010 9:27:45 AM
Subject: [lojban] Re: [lojban-beginners] Re: mi kakne lo bajra

(I'm moving this interesting topic from beginners to the main lojban
list so as not to scare away the newbies.)

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 8:59 AM, Lindar <lindarthebard@yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> xorxes: Sumti raising is sumti raising. There's no nitpicking or
> arguing semantics about it.

"Raising" is a term from linguistics that, like so many other terms
from linguistics, is often misapplied in Lojban. If you really want to
know what "raising" is, this is a good place to start:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_(linguistics)

As the article says: "Not all languages have raising verbs; English is
one that does."

And Lojban is another language that does too. Or at least it has
"raising selbri", if you don't like calling selbri "verbs".

Examples of raising selbri in Lojban are simlu, mutce, milxe, cenba,
all the measure words, in fact almost all the selbri that have a
property place are "raising selbri", since they raise an argument from
the subordinate property ka bridi into the main bridi.

Other examples of potentially raising selbri are djuno, cilre, facki,
jimpe, and all the others with a place structure involving "fact x2
about x3". The argument x3 can be raised from the subordinate clause
in x2. This rarely happens however, because the raised argument is
inconveniently located. Nobody really says:

    mi facki lo du'u sralo kei ko'a
    "I found out being Australian about her."
    "I found out about her being Australian."

Instead of:

    mi facki lo du'u ko'a sralo
    "I found out that she is Australian."

Raising is just not convenient in Lojban for these propositional
attitude selbri.

(Also, it is not clear why some of them have a raising place and
others, like for example "birti", don't. Either all should have it or
none, but Lojban place structures are so full of exceptions. But
that's just an aside.)

Yet another class of selbri that could be said to involve raising are
the ones corresponding to what the wikipedia article calls "control
verbs". These are selbri like troci, snada, fliba, zukte, kakne, and
so on, where the x1 works semantically both as the first argument of
the main verb but also as the (normally first) argument of the
subordinate bridi in the x2. So in:

      mi troci lo nu bajra
      mi snada lo nu bajra
      mi zukte lo nu bajra
      mi kakne lo nu bajra

and so on, the x1 of bajra is "raised" to the x1 position of the main selbri.

> Wanting an apple for the purpose of eating
> it is still sumti raising, because it's adding an implied concept of -
> having-. That's what sumti raising is. =/

It is, in a sense, sumti raising, but not for the reason you give.
Consider these:

      mi pilno lo mapku lo nu dasni
      mi nitcu lo mapku lo nu dasni
      mi djica lo mapku lo nu dasni

"pilno", "nitcu" and "djica" all have basically the same place
structure. (There may be others like them, for example "sazri.)

Now, we could say that in those three examples, there is a double
sumti raising, since the x1 of dasni is raised to the x1 of the main
clause, and the x2 of dasni is raised to the x2 of the main clause.
But there is nothing wrong with any of them! sumti raising is a normal
part of the Lojban grammar. Some selbri just happen to have argument
places for raised arguments. So what? Why this witch-hunt about the x2
of djica? Why doesn't anyone ever worry about the tens or maybe
hundreds of other sumti raising places that the gismu list provides?

And you didn't say what you think about "dunda lo plise". Do you
object to that too, or do you wisely ignore the gismu list comment in
that case?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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