Subject: Re: [lojban] Tentative summary on Attitudinals

From: Rob Speer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 23:19:00 -0400

On Sun, Jul 01, 2001 at 09:37:14PM -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
> Let me see if I get you. In "the man who would be king came in" the 
> "counterfactual" or however you describe it is in the restrictive relative 
> clause, but if we put {da'i} or some such there, it would leak out and make 
> the whole hypothetical "the man who is king would come in," or so? I think 
> that is right under the present rules, though relative clauses could be 
> fairly easily accomodated out. The general problem might remain -- and once 
> we start accomodating things out we could get carried away to the full set of 
> suggestions. So, I am not sure whether this shows that some, at least, of 
> the non-assertive uses can't be UI or whether it shows that we have to set up 
> some distribution rules of the sort suggested. Or maybe look for a different 
> approach altogether.

That's pretty much it. To go back to the example where I attempted to use
{da'i} while posting in Lojban, and utterly failed to communicate:

I wanted to say "The supposed logical cmavo which always matches "if" doesn't
actually exist." I said:
{le da'i logji cmavo poi roroi mapti zoi gy. if gy. cu da'inai na zasti}
and nobody knew what I was talking about.

Without the cmavo, I would be using something which I didn't believe to exist
for the x1 of my sentence. While the fact that I was using {le} instead of
{lo} might have made that okay (it might fall along the same lines as {le
nanmu cu ninmu}), I meant to clarify: "In some other world, there is a
logical cmavo which always matches "if", and in this world it doesn't exist."

Someone pointed out that I could be clearer by putting {da'i} after the {poi}:
{le logji cmavo poi da'i roroi mapti zoi gy. if gy. cu da'inai na zasti}

The {da'inai} is okay under the current understanding of attitudinals, because
I could have just as easily applied it to the whole sentence - except {da'inai
le da'i} would have been even more confusing. But the {da'i} after the {poi}
needs to stay where it is.

I'm not sure that there are any other attitudinals which would need to have a
different grammatical effect based on whether they're in a subclause ({xu}
would only serve to emphasize what you're asking about, for example). This is
why I think the "possible world" word should not be a UI.
-- 
Rob Speer