From nicholas@uci.edu Mon Sep 24 12:59:54 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: nicholas@uci.edu X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_2_2); 24 Sep 2001 19:58:56 -0000 Received: (qmail 76838 invoked from network); 24 Sep 2001 19:55:37 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by 10.1.1.220 with QMQP; 24 Sep 2001 19:55:37 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO e4e.oac.uci.edu) (128.200.222.10) by mta1 with SMTP; 24 Sep 2001 19:56:34 -0000 Received: from localhost (nicholas@localhost) by e4e.oac.uci.edu (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id MAA13002; Mon, 24 Sep 2001 12:56:34 -0700 (PDT) X-Authentication-Warning: e4e.oac.uci.edu: nicholas owned process doing -bs Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 12:56:34 -0700 (PDT) X-Sender: To: Cc: Nick NICHOLAS Subject: RE: [lojban] Dumb answers to good questions Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII From: Nick NICHOLAS 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} nicholas@uci.edu (Lojban Wiki, Resurrected Gismu)