Subject: Re: [lojban] kau -- What does it really mean?!

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 16 Aug 2002 20:16:52 EDT

In a message dated 8/16/2002 12:04:03 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

<<
> I don't know what "distinctly indirect" means. 
>>
"Has taken on the overt differences that separate the indirect from the 
direct"

<<
. What I meant is that
I think the best way to achieve a unified account of direct and
indirect questions -- i.e. a unified account of semantic interrogativity
-- is to adopt a "performative-verb-head style grammar", which then
handles direct questions in the way that indirect questions are
handled. The motivation goes beyond that, in that semantically,
direct questions involve an element of directive illocutionary force
-- or at least the act of posing a question -- plus an element of
interrogativity, while in indirect questions there is only the
element of interrogativity.

But indirect questions rarely have the property of interrogativity anyhow: 
they are oblique references to the *answers* but they don't pose the 
questions. The implicate that the audience at least does not know the answer 
(no, "implicate" is too strong: "suggest") and allow, in most cases, that the 
speaker does not, though the subject of the overt head may. I should have 
thought that the directive force of a question was and essential part of 
interrogativity -- a question that does not require an aswer is no question 
at all. Yes, "I ask F?" probably comes out to "I direct you to tell me for 
what x Fx" (more or less -- it is not the x but the Fx that is to be told).

<<
None of this really matters for Lojban: the only implication is that
the semantics of kau is not strictly compositional.

Well, Montague grammars (at least Montague's version) seemed to allow 
negative components, that took away bits from earlier pieces. So this drops 
all the "I direct you to tell me for" and just leaves "which x Fx". I think 
I have just converted myself -- which is getting a little boring this week.