Subject: RE: [lojban] Dumb answers to good questions

From: Nick NICHOLAS <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 12:56:34 -0700 (PDT)

This time, I disagree with And. Sorry, dude, but when we get into
linguistics instead of logic, we too have ideological differences. :-)

Linguistics has been plagued by confusion about 'topic'. There are three
correlated (but alas, not identical) notions of 'topic'. One is covered by
{bi'u}, and is given vs. new information: think of it as
Background/Foreground. The second is the key information vs. the non-key
information in a sentence; that's what's usually meant by Topic/Focus. The
third is what the sentence is about, vs. what the sentence says about what
it's about; that's Topic/Comment, or Theme/Rheme, and Lojban (clunkily)
has been said to simulate this by prenex.

Key vs. non-key is what is being meant here. I don't think this *is*
{ba'e} vs. {ba'enai}, because you can emphasise things for all sorts of
reasons. But it is the primary meaning of contrastive stress in English,
and cleft. They often secondarily mean Comment or New as well, but not
primarily.

Logicosemantics has been left to attitudinals in the past. I offer {da'i}
and {kau} as an example. So it is not outlandish that this be covered by
an attitudinal, rather than logicosemantics. In fact, whether Focus is a
matter of pragmatics or logicosemantics is itself an ideological question
in linguistics. And realistically, an attitudinal is all we can do without
a complete overhaul of the language.

Like I say, I don't think it is ba'e or kau, but I can't see the solution
to be that different from either.

I'm starting to suspect the solution is {ra'u}, actually. If you apply it
to individual phrases rather than entire sentences, I think we can
convince ourselves that it's doing focussing.

Nick, who should change that signature one of these days. :-)

-- 
== == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == == ==
Nick Nicholas, Breathing I REJECT {gumri}
[email-masked] (Lojban Wiki, Resurrected Gismu)