Subject: Re: [lojban] An approach to attitudinals

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 17:35:53 -0400

At 02:09 PM 06/13/2001 -0400, Invent Yourself wrote:
>Is there really a difference between attaching it to selbri and attaching
>it to .i? I wonder if anyone can have a feeling about the selbri but not
>about the sumti.

The closest thing I know of to Lojban attitudinals are Yiddish stress-based 
attitudes. I remember in The Joy of Yiddish it is described how taking a 
moderately complex sentence and stressing it on different words renders a 
different understanding (with emotive content) then one would get from the 
uninflected sentence.

Now if one were to take the Yiddish particle "oy" (not unlike Lojban "oi" 
by intent) and insert it in different places in the sentence, I believe one 
would get the same effect as moving the attitudinal around in Lojban, and 
putting "Oy" at the beginning gives a more generic sentence-wide complaint 
that is different in nuance from any of the other positions.

>And since attachment to .i and selbri is the same (?)

If you are asking, indeed I don't think that they are.

> the .i usage is free for us to apply the propositional attitude action.

It would be wrong to use attitudinals as short forms of propositional 
claims of emotion, because the moment we do that we lose the battle to have 
attitudinals be something different from and separate from the logical 
statement. Given that the attitudinal grammar is not robustly connected 
into the regular grammar (there are no YACCable rules for the interactions) 
we are asking for trouble by focussing on the positional aspects too closely.

If the selbri is complex and the terms attached before and after the selbri 
are also complex, and there are tenses and modals, then clearly there is a 
distinction in level between brivla and selbri and bridi in scope. UI 
always uses the shortest scope possible, so UI after the selbri might NOT 
apply to the selbri, the whole selbri and nothing but the selbri, and even 
with a simple selbri, the UI does not incorporate the tenses and modals and 
the sumti.

ko'a ca klama .ui thus means that I am happy about the "going", not about 
ko'as going or about the fact that the going is NOW. To get bridi-scope in 
afterthought, you need
ko'a ca klama vau .ui

and that is equivalent to ".i .ui ko'a ca klama" EXCEPT that the former 
could be followed by a GIhEk that would be outside of the attitudinal scope 
whereas the latter would include any such GIhEks. For a sufficiently 
complex sentence in a longer text stream, probably ONLY forethought 
attitudinal expression would truly have scope over the entire complex bridi.

lojbab

> > I see no reason for this "modifying the assertive nature" language. What
> > seems to be the case is that it is pragmatics and not grammar that
> > determines whether an attitudinal has propositional effect, with the
> > pragmatics being specific to the particular emotion and when/how it is
> > usually felt; I think we should leave it at that.
>
>
>Meaning, a new rule for each cmavo?
>
>
>
>
>-----
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--
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