Subject: Bringing it about that

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 13 Apr 2000 05:01:39 EDT

(This started as a RECORD of a thread from Robin's lessons, but even I have 
noticed that some of those records laready have gone beyond reporting to 
express my views or ask further questions, so I'm trying to clean up the act 
by overtly going back to problems that seem incompletely dealt with -- either 
thr question has not been asked, or it has not been answered or, I admit, I 
don't like the answer given.)

The start is to Lojban "John made me hit him," which is pretty vague in 
English and Lojban lacks an equally vague form, requiring a choice among 
mukti (motivate -- whatever that is going to mean exactly), rinka (cause -- 
apparently taken as a physical connection -- one suggestion was that John 
could only rinka it by taking my hand and hitting himself with it -- even 
electrode tricks are suspect), and some others which I either forget or don't 
clearly understand (necessitate?). And gasnu, agent.
The focus was on, first, getting to John, since the causal words seem to 
require (quite rightly) events in both the cause and the effect places. That 
meant that "John" had to be subject raised in the subject position, a 
slightly odd case. And once it was entered, a deeper problem arose: if 
"John" had to be raised from, say, "John's laughing made me hit him" to get 
"John made me...," why doesn't "John's laughing" have to be treated as a 
raising, since it is presumably something about it that worked the effect 
"The fact that John's laughing was annoying made me..." And so on, ad inf. 
The practical solution, that "John" needs to be flagged because it is not an 
event name in a place that calls for one, seems ad hoc -- one the one hand, 
John IS an event by many definitions and, on the other hand, the fact that 
"John" doesn't fit should be marker enough, whereas "John's laughing" might 
be more misleading. And, of course, if we want to say that what is raised 
depends upon what the real motivator was, then we have to face the fact that 
that might be John (not as an event even), not something he did or was, and 
so the reaising might be inappropriate, even misleading.

A second matter was the third place of mukti (and some other of the words in 
this collection?) event x1 motivates event x2 in volition of x3. Since x2 is 
presumably an even in which the agent is the one who's volition is involved, 
x3 repeats the subject of the description in x2, usually at least. These 
place structures are baselined and immutable until some future date, but we 
might consider reconsidering these cases at that date. They seem to arise 
from English (etc., but we know what most of the founding members spoke) 
expressions A motivates B to do C, which is taken to be a 3-place relation, 
even though most good grammars of English (etc.) recognize it as only 
2-place, the second place being an infinitive sentence "B to do C". Of 
course, both pieces function separately A motivates B, A motivates Cing: the 
raised subject and the suppressed subject respectively. At least, until 
reconsideration, we might well drop the use of the thrid place.

And back to the original problem. I used to advocate a predicate "x1 brings 
it about that event x2 by doing event x3." I now notice that, except 
rhetorically, this is another case of duplicating the subject of an event 
description. There is, however, no obvious predicate in Lojban that does 
this in the properly vague way, so that the original sentence is still 
untranslatable in its full obscurity.

But there does seem to be a tendency to use gasnu in something like this way 
(or rather something like the original version, but without the third place). 
This seems to turn up most in lujvo, where rafsi of gasnu turn up finally 
whenever an activity or process is derived from a state predicate (loosely 
speaking, since these are not hard concepts in Lojban). Even though literal 
is not always best in lujvo (since not in tanru) and it is hard to make rules 
about the semantics of lujvo formation, this tendency is worrisome, given the 
history of, e.g., madzo (x1 makes x2 out of material x3) in Loglan, where it 
spread to something very close to "bring it about that" but then also became 
impersonal, beyond even English "make" and Fr. "faire" and so came to mean 
very little at all (and nothing that could be traced back within Loglan to 
its core meaning). 
pc