Re: [lojban] Time for the perennial other-centric-.ui conversation

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

Well, I was raised on speech-act theory and so I would maintain that "I hope he 
comes" has two different uses, can be used in two different speech acts, 
corresponding pretty much to the two in Spanish and Lojban.  It is this 
possibility that leads to so many problems with UI and some other classes.  The 
difference of course is just whether the sentence can be true or false or not: 
the expressive ('a'o klama') cannot, since it makes no claim and is not even a 
reliable guide to whether I hope this or not.  The other ('mi pacna lo nu 
klama') is false if I don't really have that hope (both are, of course, totally 
independent of whether he comes or not).  People jump from the fact that the 
'a'o' form is in English "I hope' to using 'a'o' also for the 'pacna' form and 
then generalizing to all UI and beyond.  I agree that "emotion" is a bad word 
for what UI does, but there isn't any good word, since it covers a wide range of 
speech acts: performative, expressive of real emotions, directive, and so on 
through most of the list, possibly excluding declarative.  Maybe "expression" is 
a bad word, too, since it is after all a common word for any linguistic 
productionm but again. there are not a lot of good choices here if we want to 
cover the range (doing which may be the original bad idea - trying to cover a 
syntactic class with a pragmatic classification).




----- Original Message ----
From: Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>
To: lojban@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sun, November 28, 2010 3:31:24 PM
Subject: Re: [lojban] Time for the perennial other-centric-.ui conversation

On Sun, Nov 28, 2010 at 11:43 AM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Right as usual; I apologize for generalizing beyond the data.  My only
> disagreement would be over whether "I am truly surprised" must make a claim 
any
> more than "I hope he comes" does.

They both make claims in English, as well as expressing how the
speaker feels. In those cases the speaker expresses how they feel by
making a claim.

In English you don't really have much of an option for expressing hope
other than making a claim, unless you go with something ridiculous for
modern English like "would that he come!".  In Spanish you have both
options, like in Lojban:

¡Ojalá que venga!
.a'o (ko'a) klama

¡Espero que venga!
mi pacna lo nu (ko'a) klama

(In fact the Spanish exclamation "ojalá" comes from Arabic meaning
something like "God willing", but in Spanish it is just an
interjection and speakers are not normally aware of the etymology.)

> As for UI, the interesting question is whether
> all are expressions of some emotion (in a veeerry broad sense).

They are not, unless you distort the meaning of "emotion" so much that
it just means "anything expressed by selma'o UI". ".e'a" for example
is used to grant permission, and has nothing to do with any emotion in
the usual sense of "emotion".

> Some of them
> typically are combined with sentences and affect the status of that sentence,
> but the whole might still reasonably be called an expression.  There are a few
> that are harder to place.

Most utterances can reasonably be called an expression. Normally when
you say something, you mean to express something. Not all expressions
are made through claims, but that doesn't mean that claims can't be
made in order to express something.

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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