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

From: "And Rosta" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 14 Aug 2001 02:14:42 +0100

pc:
> [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.

In order to save debating time, and to save me the effort of justifying my
claim, are you willing to take my word for it that on syntactic and
semantic grounds wh-clauses clearly divide up into relative and interrogative
clauses (the clarity not extending to the analysis of wh-ever clauses)?

I am willing to grant you that not all interrogative clauses identified
by grammatical criteria deserve to be called interrogative clauses by
etymological criteria (i.e. not all have anything to do with any sense
of asking questions).

> 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.

I'm not sure if you're talking about how to analyse their logic, or how to
provisionally say them in Lojban. Certainly we have to analyse them on a
case by case basis. And until we have a better way of lojbanning each case,
Q-kau serves as a stopgap solution.

As I've said in another message, I do believe that there will be one
answer that will fit all these cases. But regardless of this, I think it's
right that Jorge and I have been raising the hard cases, since these are
precisely the ones that have resisted previous analysis, unlike the
knowing/wondering cases.

> <> 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).

What they have to do with questions is that they. along with questions,
all share this 'ranginess', and it is this ranginess that characterizes
interrogative clauses in English. "Covert interrogative" means "Covert
ranginess expressor". I don't mind if we start talking about ranginess
rather than interrogativity, if this terminological shift helps to
avoid misunderstanding.

> <> 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.).

It sounds like we're in agreement then. We concentrate on depending on
the weather, on apparel varying, on changing one's name, and so on.
Come back to wondering later.

--And.