From rob@twcny.rr.com Sun Jul 01 20:24:47 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: rob@telenet.net X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_2_0); 2 Jul 2001 03:24:47 -0000 Received: (qmail 83625 invoked from network); 2 Jul 2001 03:24:47 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.142) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 2 Jul 2001 03:24:47 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO telenet.net) (204.97.152.225) by mta3 with SMTP; 2 Jul 2001 03:24:47 -0000 Received: from riff (ip-209-23-14-1.modem.logical.net [209.23.14.1]) by telenet.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id XAA08187 for ; Sun, 1 Jul 2001 23:24:44 -0400 Received: from rob by riff with local (Exim 3.22 #1 (Debian)) id 15GuEn-0000fE-00 for ; Sun, 01 Jul 2001 23:19:01 -0400 Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2001 23:19:00 -0400 To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Tentative summary on Attitudinals Message-ID: <20010701231900.A2479@twcny.rr.com> Reply-To: rob@twcny.rr.com References: <26.17993d3f.28712a4a@aol.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <26.17993d3f.28712a4a@aol.com> User-Agent: Mutt/1.3.18i X-Is-It-Not-Nifty: www.sluggy.com Sender: Rob Speer From: Rob Speer On Sun, Jul 01, 2001 at 09:37:14PM -0400, pycyn@aol.com 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