Esperanto on sci.lang pt 2 of 4

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@GREBYN.COM>]

Complexity of Esperanto Syntax  Pt 2 of 4
  MR2:(cont.)
  * Clause-mate reflexivization.  Compare
     Li ordonis al la servisto vesti lin   'He ordered the servant to dress him'
     Li ordonis al la servisto vesti sin                   '...to dress himself'
  Obviously Esperanto reflexivization is as dependent on clause structure
  as it is in English.  (But are the rules exactly the same?)

   DH2:
   Almost certainly not.  (My own language-usage uses the infinitive a lot
   less, in favor of the "ke -u" structure; hence "Li ordonis, ke la
   servisto vestu lin" vs.  "Li ordonis, ke la servisto vestu sin".)

   ID1:
   For what it's worth, Russian distinguishes between

     _On prikazal sluge odet' sebja_.  (the servant is to dress the orderer)
     _On prikazal sluge odet'sja._     (the servant is to dress himself)

   This despite the fact that _odet'sja_ < _odet' sebja_.  Not sure if
   Polish works in the same way (and Esperanto has roots in both of these).

    MR5:
    Actually it looks like Esperanto agrees with English here, and disagrees
    with Russian.

     ID5:
     Yes.


    MR5:
    _sebja_ ~= _sin_, n'est-ce pas?

     ID5:
     _sebja_ est l'accusatif du pronom re'flexif, c'est-a`-dire plus ou moins
     la me^me chose que "sin".  Mais ci-dessus _sebja_ indique le mai^tre,
     alors que "sin" indique le valet.


  MR2:
  * Conjunction reduction.  Can one say
     Kristo dormis kaj liaj sekvantoj.   'Christ slept and his servants.'
  What reductions are possible and not possible?

  * Copula reduction.  One can say
     Mi farbos la muron blua.   'I will paint the wall blue.'
  but what about
     Mi volas la muron blua.    'I want the wall blue.'
     Mi kredas la muron blua.   '*I believe the wall blue.'

   DH2:
   All are used.

   ID1:
   Another interesting question is why it is _blua_ rather than _bluan_.
   (I'm extrapolating from Russian again.)

    PJ1:
    Mi farbos la muron bluan = I will paint the blue wall
    Mi farbos la muron (tiel ke g^i ig^u) blua = I will paint the wall (so that
                                                 it becomes) blue


  MR2:(cont.)
  * The verbal system.  Like Spanish or English, Esperanto has a mixed
  verbal system, making use of both auxiliaries and inflections.  _Esti_
  is used to form both passives and progressives:
     La shipo estas chirkauita de akvo.  'The ship is surrounded by water.'
     Li estis dirinta kelkajn vortojn.   'He had been saying a few words.'

  One must learn which verbs are inherently transitive (e.g.  _movi_
  'move'), requiring inflection for intransitive meanings (_movighi_), and
  which are intransitive (e.g.  _sidi_ 'sit'), with a derived transitive
  (_sidigi_).

   DH2:
   Yes, but this is a lexical, not a syntactic, question.  Transitivity and
   intransitivity are inherent in the meanings of the words.  Problems with
   transitivity/intransitivity seem to arise in general because most people
   learn Esperanto as a second language and absorb the semantic content of
   its words in terms of the semantic content of similar words in their own
   language.  As William Auld once pointed out, "If you learn that _droni_
   means 'to drown,' you are going to be confused; but if you learn that it
   means _sufokighi en akvo_, you'll have no problems."


  MR2:(cont.)
  Imperfect tenses are produced with yet another inflection (_movadis_
  'was moving, often moved, etc.').

   DH2:
   To us, this is not an imperfect tense of "movi" but a past tense of
   "movadi," which is a different word from "movi".


  MR2:
  The sequence of tenses in dependent clauses is a bit odd for English speakers:
     Li diris, ke li faris [past] ghin.            'He said he had done it.'
     Li insistis, ke mi faru [imperative!] tion.   'He insisted that I do it.'

   DH2:
   But actually more understandable:  in Esperanto indirect discourse, ",
   ke X" is an exact replacement for the direct ":  'X'", whereas the
   English rules, like the Latin ones, are somewhat more complicated.

   ID1:
   Since English speakers speak a very odd language, it is to be expected
   that anything simple and sensible will sound a bit odd to them.  :-) In
   this case Esperanto once again patterns with Slavic, as well as with
   such languages as Japanese, whose syntaxes are free of the abomination
   known as coordination of tenses.


  MR2:(cont.)
  Again, it would be interesting to know what restrictions occur on these
  processes.  Some English sentences don't passivize, for instance.  Can
  you say "La pilko estas havata de mi" ('*The ball is had by me')?

   DH2:
   Yeahp.  In fact, we can say it in English, too; we just _don't_.  Maybe
   in a few hundred years Esperanto will also have modes of expression
   which are syntactically legal but are simply not used for reasons of
   habit.


  MR2:
  * Presuppositions.  Presumably
     Mi scias ke Paulo mortighis.       'I know that Paul is dead.'
  implies that Paul is dead.  I'd be surprised if presuppositions,
  conversational implicatures, speech acts, were any less complex in Esperanto
  than in English.

   DH2:
   Probably not.

   KM1:(on MR2)
   With all due respect (and BTW it's nice to know that there are
   Esperantists now who are aware of pragmatics;

    MR3:
    I was a teenage Esperantist;

     KM3:
     Me too; 'course that's not all I was a teenage.  Luckily, I studied
     other languages, which was why I learned E very well.


    MR3:
    but in later years I'm afraid my loyalty shifted to other languages
    and other causes...

     KM3:
     Truth is, there are plenty of people around who know the language but
     don't have movement loyalties.  Maybe we need a support group <:->


   KM1:(cont. on MR2)
   I hope it's spreading
   <:->), the sentence above can't possibly make any sense.  It's possible
   that I'm misinterpreting you here, but note that a constructed language
   doesn't "have" presuppositions, implicatures, and speech acts because
   these notions have to do with the extent to which interpretations of
   utterances in context follow from the shared belief-worlds of speaker
   and hearer, i.e., culture.

    ID2:(on KM1)
    You are misinterpreting him.  The example he gave was (more or less)

      `Mi scias ke _P_.' --> `_P_.'
      `I know that _P_.' --> `_P_.'

    (For `-->' read `presupposes'.)  I already expressed my feeling that the
    presupposition in this case is extralinguistical; in so far as "scii"
    means `know', the presupposition has to be there.  You can't say someone
    knows something that is not true, no matter in what language.

     KM2:
     As I suggested in my original post, the jury is still out, to say the
     least, on presuppositions, so I'll say nothing more about this example,
     except that since presuppositions are linked to specific linguistic
     expressions (their "triggers"), absolutely nothing that I know of
     prevents a language from having a verb that means what 'know' means but
     is not factive.  Ditto for 'regret,' 'admit' and all the other ones.
     But the issue here is whether presuppositions depend in some way on the
     shared belief-world of the language users, and until we know what
     presuppositions are, I don't think we can approach that question.

     (The problem, for those interested, is that presuppositions can't be
     what they have been thought to be -- propositions taken for granted
     mutually by speaker and hearer at the time the utterance containing the
     presupposition trigger is performed -- because they can be used to
     introduce new information.  For example

             We regret that the meeting has been cancelled.

     is supposed to presuppose (like 'know' in the other example) the truth
     of its complement; but this sentence can be used to inform someone who
     didn't already know it, that the meeting had been cancelled.  Similarly

             Sorry I'm late; my children spilled milk on me.

     is supposed to presuppose (via existential presupposition) that the
     speaker had children; but the sentence could be used to inform someone
     who didn't already know it that the speaker had children.

     So:  in view of this, Georgia Green (in _Pragmatics and Natural Language
     Understanding_) proposes that presuppositions are taken for granted only
     by the speaker.  Fine?  No, because then I do not see the difference
     between asserting and presupposing.)

      ID3:
      "think", "believe", "suppose" or something.  That is, for me the
      factivity of "know" is an essential part of its semantics.

      KM4:
      The standard doctrine is that the presuppositions triggered by a lexical
      item can't be part of its semantics, i.e. part of its lexical meaning,
      because (a) lexical meaning is affected by negation while
      presuppositions aren't (e.g., both "John knows that tea is free" and
      "John doesn't know that tea is free" presuppose "tea is free")

       ID4:
       That would lead me to the thought that lexical meaning has a part which
       is affected by negation and a part which isn't, so that negation is akin
       to the operation defined on complex numbers (whatever it may be called
       in English) which inverts the sign of the imaginary part (what you call
       the lexical meaning) but leaves the real part (the presuppositions) as
       is.


      KM4:
      and (b)
      presuppositions can be suspended, as in "Tea may be free, though I don't
      know that it is" (but not denied, of course, as in "*I know that tea is
      free, but it isn't"), while things that clearly are part of lexical
      meaning can't be suspended, as in "*Bill may be dead, since Henry killed
      him."

       ID4:
       Isn't this a different "know" we're dealing with here?  One that means
       `be certain of' as opposed to `be aware of'?  What makes me wonder about
       this is that you can't do this with the Russian _znat'_, say, which
       means that there ought to be separate entries in a bilingual dictionary.


    KM3:(on KM1 and MR3 response below:)
    Note emphasis on *have* in the above; I think your comments immediately
    below miss that.  I was trying to emphasize that a language doesn't
    "have" a pragmatics in the sense that it "has" grammatical features.
    (Whence my reluctance to get into this:  there are linguists who still
    try to account for some pragmatic phenomena semantically, and for them,
    what I just said would not necessarily hold.)

     MR5:
     Hmm, then what *does* "have" pragmatics?  I suppose the most reasonable
     answer is "the culture".  However, I don't think this leaves the
     divisions between "language" and "pragmatics" airtight; after all,
     language is an expression of culture.

     For example, English has scores of questions with the force of
     requests-- "Could you get me a drink?"  "Can I bother you for the time?"
     "Do you suppose you could turn that thing down?"  "Would you be willing
     to wait?"  Wierzbicka tells us that such sentences would sound quite
     strange-- and more to the point, wouldn't always accomplish their
     intent-- if translated into Polish.  She argues that such questions
     support the values and goals of Anglo-American *culture* (e.g. respect
     for others' individuality, avoidance of being seen to impose).

     So is this culture or language?  On the one hand the values expressed
     and the desire to express them are cultural.  On the other hand the
     language itself provides the means to gratify those desires.

     I suppose Esperanto would not have developed constructions, such as
     English indirect imperatives, or the Polish system of diminutives, or
     the "formal" forms of verbs in Japanese, keyed to the values or
     practices of specific cultures.  It would be interesting to know if it's
     developed or even adopted *any* pragmatic constructions that are not
     simply common to all the European languages.