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

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 15 Jul 2001 04:45:24 +0100

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

What I mean is that the lexical form "I express such-and-such an emotion
about p" is always interpreted as "I state that I express such-and-such an
emotion about p".

> <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}.

The raw emotions may well be the same, but their factivities might be different.

> Still, that is a hypothesis that could be defeated by showing that {ui} is
> not factive but {gleki} is factive, or conversely.

Can it be shown? It seems, rather, something to be stipulated.

> So we need some independent way of lining
> these critters up (unless you really meant that they can't be).

I don't think that lining these critters up solves any of the current issues.

> <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).

Would that there were. I very vaguely recall suggesting something like this
years
ago. So if "xa'u" were such a converter, then "xa'u kalci" = "O shit!".

I thought for a moment just now that "sei" might do it, but I don't think so.

> 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.

I see. Well, I wish to pour cold water on the idea. OK, any UI may well
be in correspondence with some brivla or other, but we don't know which
brivla, and there is certainly no reason why it should be a gismu. So
this exercise avails us nought.

--And.