From a.rosta@ntlworld.com Thu Aug 09 18:12:30 2001 Return-Path: X-Sender: a.rosta@ntlworld.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-7_3_1); 10 Aug 2001 01:12:30 -0000 Received: (qmail 23841 invoked from network); 10 Aug 2001 01:12:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.27) by l7.egroups.com with QMQP; 10 Aug 2001 01:12:29 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mta07-svc.ntlworld.com) (62.253.162.47) by mta2 with SMTP; 10 Aug 2001 01:12:29 -0000 Received: from andrew ([62.253.88.74]) by mta07-svc.ntlworld.com (InterMail vM.4.01.03.00 201-229-121) with SMTP id <20010810011227.QVUM710.mta07-svc.ntlworld.com@andrew> for ; Fri, 10 Aug 2001 02:12:27 +0100 To: Subject: RE: [lojban] Another preliminary note on Indirect Questions Date: Fri, 10 Aug 2001 02:11:33 +0100 Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook IMO, Build 9.0.2416 (9.0.2910.0) Importance: Normal In-Reply-To: <9e.186b2269.28a34f4b@aol.com> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.2615.200 From: "And Rosta" pc: > It seems a stupid point, but indirect questions are by definition questions > in indirect discourse. Consequently *they* can only occur as arguments of > predicates of linguistic activity, where it would be possible to use direct > discourse -- a quote -- instead. It would be nice if this were true, but it isn't, at least if English is our guide. The magic potion changed how tall I am. They differ in how tall they are. Your stride length depends on how tall you are. As I've said before, IMO the simplification is to be made by treating direct questions as a variety of indirect question, rather than vice versa. > What the other things we are mainly talking > about may be and how they are related (if at all) to indirect questions, > needs to be worked out. The first step toward that is probably getting > indirect questions in the ordinary sense out of the way and then getting some > clear cases of the other things. If there are any. Examples like the ones above seem to be harder to analyse than indirect questions with cognitive predicates. And finding a logical generalization to cover indirect questions in all environments is even harder. But I do think we're making progress, thanks to Jorge's imaginative indagations. --And.