Subject: Re: [lojban] RECORD: emotions

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 20 May 2000 13:22:57 EDT

In a message dated 00-05-19 12:39:29 EDT, you write:

<< 
This seems related (not identical) to the performative <-> constative
duality. Performative: saying it makes it true. "I now pronounce you man
and wife". Constative: the speaker just wants to convey information. 
"Those two got married yesterday.">>
Saying it in certain circumstances makes it true that they are man and wife, 
not makes the sentence true -- if it is a performative, then it is not a 
constative, and so does not make a claim (i.e., is not either true or false, 
though it has other kinds of successes and failures).

<<It would seem to me that none of these, performative, constative nor
expressing an emotion, have a whole lot to do with "making a claim", which
to my mind means acting like a philosopher and staking out an intellectual
position and aggressively asserting its truth value against the opposition
of jackass competitors.>>
Sorry; it is jsut a way of saying "says something that is either true or 
false"

<<[Let X = author of "How to Say Things with Words", which pc recommended
that I read many years ago, and which is now out of the catalog at
UCLA! Hiss, boo! So I can't refresh my memory, which is bad about
people.] >>
X= J.L. Austin and it is _How to DO Things with Words_

<<But having defined "performative" and "constative", X pointed out that any
utterance has a tendency to be both at once, just more or less. And when
the spouse says "you didn't send me flowers", the response will definitely
end up as a combination of expressing the emotion of painful separation,
plus conveying the fact that it was felt at the prior time, plus
establishing one's sincerity (one hopes) by saying the appropriate words,
plus staking out a claim of innocence if the hoped-for effect of the
previous three aspects fails to mollify the spouse.>>
Actually, Austin moves on to a distinction between the illucutionary force 
and the perlocutionary force of an utterance (related to my old "brings it 
about that by" predicate) what he does _in_ saying the utterance (constative, 
performative, .... -- a whole new list of things with new terminology) and 
what he succeeds in having done by all of that: assuaging his wife's anger, 
fear or what not, say.

<<In Lojban, how do you tag a bridi to indicate that it's performative? >>
Probably not appropriate: if it works it is performative, if not it isn't.
And remember that in some stranger grammars, every sentence has as its 
highest verb a performative defining the illocutionary force of the 
utterance: I hereby inform you that, I hereby decree that, ....