Subject: Re: [lojban] Bringing it about that

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 14 Apr 2000 20:22:58 -0400

At 05:01 AM 04/13/2000 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>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.

Nora notes that there is a specific place where it is important to raise 
one sumti out of x2 into x3, and that is where there is are multiple 
possible motivees amongst the places of x2. She used the example "Fred 
motivates (lenu) Rick kissing Alice" and the choice of x3 might indicate 
whether it was Rick, Alice, or both who were motivated into that x2 event.

Nora thus agrees with me that mukti is like gasnu and zukte. In particular, 
mukti is talking about the motives for someone, presumably the agent, of 
the event x2. But x2 may be an event wherein it is not necessarily clear 
who the agent is, and thus it fits the pattern of gasnu and zukte in which 
the explicit raising is to identify the filler of the agentive role, a role 
that does not exist in all predicates, and which is semantically ambiguous 
in others (such as cinba and gletu).

lojbab

----
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org (newly updated!)