Subject: Sorta about attitudes and assertions and the like

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2001 12:29:49 EDT

In the heady ferment that arose from injecting a leaven of logic into the 
stodgy wort of linguistics, when they were morte theories about what a 
grammar should be than Indians to try the theories out on (so that I had to 
exchange feather for dot, hence hantovirus for Plasmodium malariae, so that I 
ended up with as Quechua terrier, famous for his Peruvian bark -- but I 
digress), one class of theories held that almost all surface sentences 
derived from deep NPs, the objects of speech-act verbs. Each of the 
different (classes of) speech-act verbs permitted -- even encouraged -- a 
somewhat different range of moves to get from this secret structure to what 
actually came out the mouth or onto paper. Thus one fully formed deep 
sentence could give rise to a variety of surface sentences depending on which 
of the moves were used and, conversely, a single surface sentence might be 
derivable from a variety of sources with different speech-act verbs at least. 
Strictly, this last is not quite correct, since there was often the 
assumption that either context would fix a unique source or features of 
presentation would, but these consideration were, as usual, not 
systematically develped beyond the ad hoc hypothesis-saving stage. 
In any case, this theory (whatever its overall value) sheds some light on two 
parts of the recent discussion: the difference between expressing and 
assserting and the relation between the effects of attitude indicators and 
the related brivla. 

On the first, consider for now a deep sentence (on this view) Express(I, 
Happy(I, Come(she))) (skipping messy details, of course). The simplest 
surface of this would be English "Yay!" (or some such -- pick your favorite) 
or Lojban {ui} ,involving the derivation: dropping the source of happiness 
(context covers), stressing "Express" over the predicate component. Next 
would be either "Yay, she's coming" ~ {ui ko'a klama} (without the dropping) 
or "I'm happy!" ~ {mi gleki} (lowering the force of express over the 
predicate). Next would come "I'm happy that she's coming" ~ {mi gleki lenu 
ko'a klama} (with both changes, but still, note, an expression, not an 
assertion). And finally would be "I am expressing my happiness (/that I am 
happy) that she is coming" ~ {mi cnisku le gleki lenu ko'a klama}. This 
last, having no concealed speech-act head, is in the default speech act, 
probably informative. On the other hand, Inform (I, you, Happy(I, Come 
(she))) allows only two moves: to "I am happy that she is coming" ~ {mi gleki 
lenu ko'a klama} and "I am informing you that I am happy that she is coming" 
~ {mi datnydu'a lenu mi gleki lenu ko'a klama}. The first of these is 
apparently identical with the next to last in the expressive series. This is 
a fact of life in English, i.e., that "I am happy (that...)" is ambiguous. 
Is it so in Lojban or must the derivation rules for Lojban -- in this system 
-- be different at this poiint, requiring, say, that {ui} remain even when 
{mi gleki} appears?

As to the second problem, the point is clear: sentences that turn up attached 
to (attitudinals), begin their linguistic life subordinate to the 
corresponding predicates and thus are subject to whatever requirements those 
predicates place on them. We could then resolve the issue of whether a 
particular attitudinal is factive or not by considering the corresponding 
predicate. More difficult question in use could be resolved by returning to 
the full form, with all the predicates as predicates. Provided we can figure 
what predicates go with what attitudinals and what the predicates do to their 
subordinated clauses. And what is subordinated to what in strings of 
attitudinals (the sentence that started this round on attitudinals had 
several of them in a clump and different views about commitment of the kernel 
might reduce to different views about subordination: what does "modifies the 
preceding word" mean exactly in these cases.