Subject: Preliminary notes on indirect questions

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 6 Aug 2001 17:40:35 EDT

So, I am starting from scratch, mainly to keep the rust from getting too 
thick and because Nick and And have more important tasks.

1) I don't know how deep the identity of interrogative and relative pronouns 
goes. In I-E it seems present from the get-go, but I don't know how much 
farther back it goes. From what little I know about languages beyond the 
wildest grasp of Nostratists, the question sems not even to make sense there 
-- relatives and questions seem to be handled by totally different devices, 
neither really pronouns. Anyhow, in English they are often hard to 
distinguish (indeed, rarely unquestionably so), so, before we try to find an 
indirect question form for some expression, we might be well advised to try a 
relative clause one instead. It works amazingly often. And, in Lojban, it 
has the advantage of giving something more obviously grammatical than some of 
the offerings involving {makau}.

2) The standard theory (not the only one nor necessarily the most 
satisfactory in some particular respects, but the one all others start off 
from) is that questions are sets of answers, claims, of some sort. The 
various theories start to diverge on what sort of answers get in, but for the 
most part the set cannot be limited to the correct answers (else the puzzle 
about wondering and doubting -- though these can be dealt with). It is also 
standard that the referent of a thing in indirect context is the its direct 
sense. Thus, the referent of an indirect question is either the sense of a 
set of claims, a property of claims, then, or a set of senses of claims, a 
set of propositions, then. Lojban seems to go for the latter, though some 
moves tend to suggest the former as well (and the relation between the two is 
so unclear as to leave the question of a middle ground open). 

3) If an indirect question refers to a set of propositions, then the standard 
way of talking about it, {le du'u}, is probably wrong in most cases, for the 
speaker often does not know which proposition the knower, for example, knows 
and, since this is oblique context, the various possibilities are not 
reducible to a single archetype. John may be the tallest boy in the class 
and the Suzy know that the tallest boy in the class went to the store but 
that does not mean that, when she knows who went to the store, she knows that 
John did -- for she may be unaware or indifferent to the fact that John is 
the tallest boy. So, it is safer to go with {lo du'u} "some apparopriate 
answer" (correct in the case of {djuno}, say).