Subject: Re: attitudinals

From: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 21:26:40 EDT

Nice to see someone else's spleen for a change. 
The situation seems to be this. For the most part, the Book works just fine, 
except where it gets confused on the fundamental distinction between 
expressing an emotion (actually, it is worst on the cognitives) and claiming 
to have that emotion. That corrected, ther are generally no problems. The one 
exception so far noted is the case of {a'o}, which is generally taken to be a 
projection of a hope for the fulfillment of the mentioned state of affairs 
(whose occurrence is not yet settled in the mind of speaker). A couple of 
people-- one of them Lojbab -- claim that they at least sometime understand 
it to mean 1) that the attached claim is true and 2) to express a hope about 
some more remote (and unspecified) consequences of the occurrence of that 
mentioned state of affairs.
Should this claim of a second meaning of {a'o} be borne out (and I can't see 
any real reason to doubt it, even if it does not work in English), then the 
possibility is opened that other attitudinals that generally do not 
presuppose the truth of the attached claim may also have such simultaneously 
veridical and remote expressive meanings. Conversely, the usual veridical 
and proximal expressive expressions, might also have non-veridical or remote 
expressive meanings. None of these have been suggested yet, so far as I can 
see. Until some are, let's concentrate on the situation with {a'o}, seeking 
a solution that 1) keeps as much of what works unscathed 2) can be 
generalized to other cases like {a'o}, 3) allows a fairly easy generalization 
to cases of the opposite sort if they arise.
At the moment, I am sticking (in my mind) to a UI suffix in the xV'V area, 
for "aberrant behavior" after-attached to anything being considered: {a'o 
xu'a} for Lojbab's "the sentence is true and makes me hopeful" and that 
requires an immediate {iixu'a} by parity of reasoning. I don't, by the way, 
expect this will be the final solution, but it gives (as x's were meant to) a 
means of playing with the notions within the current rules.