Subject: Re: [lojban] Another preliminary note on Indirect Questions

From: [email-masked]
Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2001 19:41:38 EDT

In a message dated 8/11/2001 5:06:50 PM Central Daylight Time, 
[email-masked] writes:

> They are, grammatically, interrogative clauses. And we have been rendering
> them into Lojban using Q-kau.
> 

This is part, at least, of the point at issue; they are clauses, perhaps, but 
seem to have no connection to interrogatives except the WH words, which are 
used for all sorts of things. To be sure, some relations are beginning to 
emerge, but it seems a mistake to assume that there is going to be one answer 
that will fit all these cases. It seems better to deal with the various 
cases and then see if anything ties them together. 

<> In fact, each of the "questions" seems to be a roundabout way of saying
> "height," a different category altogether.

Not a different category altogether. "He knows my height", "He asked my
height", "He decided (on) the height of the hatstand he was making" --
here "height" is a covert interrogative (as in "He asked the time"), as
it would be in the examples above.>

Sorry, I don't see it. "He asked my height" is interrogative because of 
"ask;" the others don't seem to have any interrogative element at all. The 
may share a certain vagueness, ranginess, using a cover word for a specific 
(though the question one does not have that feature), but what has that to do 
with questions (I have an answer, of course, but, since I don't know how it 
works, I'll leave the question stand).  

<Of course it seems silly to call these "(indirect) questions", but
direct and indirect questions belong nondistinctly to the more general
class of what for want of a better term are called 'interrogatives',
which also includes cases like the ones above.>

I tend to use "question" and "interrogative" interchangeably or for making 
some technical point. What is the technical point here?

<> And using that notion does point to the usual
> tale that questions are in some way the set of answers.  The details --and
> especially the grammatical ones -- need a lot of working out, but perhaps 
the
> fundamental unity is there.  Until it is, I think we should lay off the
> "question" part for clarity.

I don't understand that last sentence.>

As I said, I think we should treat these as different things -- and 
especially not get hung up on the question cases -- until we have some 
evidence of a connection among them and how they fit in. We have cases of 
generalizing one kind of item into others that look somehow the same, but not 
in any explained way, and we have ended up with muddled and befuddling 
categories (tense, e.g.).