Subject: Re: [lojban] Sorta about attitudes and assertions and the like

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2001 18:33:53 EDT

In a message dated 7/14/2001 10:58:05 AM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> Are you by any chance a fan of avantgarde postmodern British poetry (e.g.
> J. H. Prynne)?
> 

The only British poet I can think of having read is S.J. Forrest, who is 
preVatican, not post-modern.

<I dispute that in English the topmost, 'performative'/attitudinal predicate
can ever be expressed lexically (by a verb with clausal complement). This is
one reason why I don't baulk at Lojban expressing propositional attitudes by
UI, which are outside the logical apparatus.>
Does that mean we have emotions we express but that we cannot name? Possible 
but requiring considerable argument. I suppose you mean rather the 
Express(1, p) part, which is rather unlikely on the face of it -- as the 
oddity of the "full surface form" suggests,though the report of the event 
does make sense, so it is the performative, speech-act usage that is suspect. 
Maybe Express and the like don't have first-person, peformative, forms (a 
different set of transformations of the underlying bit -- if you do believe 
in it). Or you may think the whole theory is a crock. Both the last two are 
quite respectable views and I am inclined to be hospitable to them at least.

<Not really, because you don't know in advance what the corresponding 
predicate
is. Even if gleki might be factive, it doesn't necessarily follow that ui 
would
be too, because it is not a given that gleki = ui.>

I think that is a real problem, though in this case we are more or less given 
that the emotion expressed by {ui} is described by {gleki}. Still, that is a 
hypothesis that could be defeated by showing that {ui} is not factive but 
{gleki} is factive, or conversely. So we need some independent way of lining 
these critters up (unless you really meant that they can't be).

<I'd like to see an array of pertinent examples that demand changing UI into
selbri>

I sure don't want to change UI into selbri in any sense of that expression. 
They serve two different functions fundamentally, even if in some languages 
-- and maybe even in Lojban sometimes (hopefully well-marked) -- the selbri 
can do some of the work of a UI. Given all the "makes this a that"s there 
are in Lojban, I would be surprised if there is not a "makes following selbri 
and attitudinal" somewhere (though I did not find it). The exercise here was 
to find some place for people who did want to derive UI pragmatics (or 
whatever it is) from that for brivla.