Re: [lojban] Re: xu dai

[Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com>]

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 1:40 PM, John E Clifford <kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Not sure whether this is terminological or conceptual, but things don't square
> up with my understanding.  'mi stidi lo nu do klama' and 'e'u do klama' are not
> equally Informative speech acts, since 'e'u' makes the following sentence not
> informative but a suggestion, a Directive speech act.

Part of the problem here seems to be that we are comparing apples with oranges.

"e'u do klama" is indeed a suggestion, but we can't be sure whether
"mi stidi lo nu do klama" is an assertion or something else, since it
doesn't have an explicit speech act marker. Granted that we do usually
take sentences that are unmarked for speech act to be assertions, but
context and content may suggest otherwise. "ju'a mi stidi lo nu do
klama" is an assertion, but "ca'e mi stidi lo nu do klama", "I hereby
suggest that you go" I would say is closer to a suggestion than to an
assertion. (What is it? A "declaration"?) So while it's true that
"ju'a" is the most common speech act indicator assumed in the absence
of an explicit one, I suspect that for some type of predicates in the
first person present (like mi stidi) something like "ca'e" is more
often the intended speech act,

> Neither of these is, by the way, Expressive of anything.
> The function of Expressive speech acts is to express feeling and the like.  But,
> just as one can misinform using an Informative speech act, one can simulate a
> feeling one does not have in an Expressive speech act.  The syntactical
> legitimacy of the form does not rely on its accuracy.
> I find the notion that asking a question is Expressive a little hard to follow:
> what is it expressing?

I agree that a question is not an expressive speech act.

What I don't share is your implied hypothesis that "dai" only makes
sense as a modifier of expressive speech acts. It has an obvious
generalization to other types of speech acts, one that you described
yourself, so what is it that you find problematic about it? It simply
indicates that the speaker is performing a given speech act putting
themselves in the shoes of someone else. Why restrict its scope to
expressive speech acts only?

mu'o mi'e xorxes

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