Re: [lojban] Re: xu dai

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

We comeback to the question of Lojban being a logical language and what that means.  While I think we have wandered unconsciously pretty far from the original meaning, I don't see any reason to deliberately and consciously do so.  And one part of all that is to keep one grammatical distinction overt (or at least clearly marked).  Now it would be a possible one -- but one uniting slippage, I think, to allow that for certain predicate in certain contexts, when unmarked, to indicate a different speech act from the usual one (informative).  We do it all the time in English, of course, and it creates countless problems for logical analysis.  Better to stick to the simple rule, hard though it seems to be for people to grasp or follow (why pursue a language which is supposed to change the way you think and then changes it back so that it works like one you already have?)
Did I really describe a generalization for 'dai'?  Other than to point out how ridiculous it was for any serious purpose (I have a logician's contempt for rhetoric)?  'e'u dai do klama' is a suggestion, if at all, that I am making (no one else has said it) and trying to pass the blame to someone else is mere chicanery.  In particular, your suggesting that you come seems inherently a vapid speech act, unless you sense an objection to it.  So, my making the suggestion that you come but projecting it on you is either to state those objections or to rebut them.  But, as with the question case, it is ultimately my speech act, not yours (not even one you intended, if the question cases are anything to go by).
Sent from my iPad

On Jul 16, 2011, at 15:46, Jorge Llambías <jjllambias@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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