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Esperanto on sci.lang pt 3 of 4
Complexity of Esperanto Syntax Pt 3 of 4
MR3:(cont. on KM1 on MR2)
Hmm, that's an interesting claim, but surely rather too strong. Do you
really maintain that
Mi scias, ke mia fratino parolas Maundsbarlingve.
'I know that my sister speaks Moundsbar.'
doesn't imply that my sister speaks Moundsbar (and, for that matter,
that my sister exists)?
KM3:
[not imply] presuppose
As I said before we really don't understand presupposition, even
fundamentally. If *I* uttered the above sentence I would be making
those presuppositions, because I would be tacitly assuming that 'scii'
precisely corresponds to my native 'know' and is therefore factive.
Obviously this would not necessarily hold for speakers of a language in
which one may use a near equivalent of Eng. 'know' and follow it with
an indication of doubt, e.g. saying literally
John knows Mary is ill, but maybe she's not.
I'm told you can get such things in Japanese; perhaps someone could
comment on that.
MR5:
I'm having trouble wrapping my mind around the concept of a non-factive
'know'. Wouldn't such a term really be an equivalent of 'believe' not
'know'?
MR3:(cont. on KM1 on MR2)
Or that you can't baptize a baby, christen a ship, or open a meeting in
Esperanto?
KM3:
Note that none of this can be decided on purely linguistic grounds. You
can do any of this stuff that some culture has legitimated in E. You
could also do it in Lojban or Pig Latin if such were legitimated. NB:
you could have doubts about legitimacy.
Austin in _How to Do Things with Words_ (the original modern statement
of speech act theory) actually makes provision for cases where a person
might do something like try to perform a marriage in Esperanto only to
find it was not legitimate (culture can't provide for every
contingency). Possible uncertainties like this, for Austin, merely
reinforced his contention that it all depends on society, not language.
Turning to less institutional examples, if some Esperantist says to me
something like
Sendube mi cxeestos la kunvenon.
Doubtlessly I will attend the meeting.
I really *don't* know whether that was a promise or not! It could be a
hedge. I have to guess at the speaker's intent, which depends on
non-linguistic factors. Somebody suggested earlier that such things
could be listed in lexical entries in dictionaries. But words like
'sendube' won't even be in dictionaries, because they're regularly
derived forms..."Mi kulpigxis pro tio" does that count as an admission
of guilt or not? My PV doesn't say...
MR5:
I think it was Takao Suzuki who complained that dictionaries are no good
at defining words-- that is, at explaining how words fit into the
semantic structure of the language. Certain pragmatic information seems
to me to be part of the definition of a word, whether or not
dictionaries do it that way. For instance, "but" differs from "and"
chiefly pragmatically, does it not?
With your "Sendube..." example, however, I don't think even a
pragmatically savvy dictionary could help you with (for instance) a
Slavic speaker who (from an Anglo point of view) overuses absolute terms
like "sendube"; or with an Indonesian speaker who is just saying what he
expects you want to hear; or any kind of speaker who just happens to be
idly speculating, or resolving, or lying, rather than promising.
MR3:(cont. on KM1 on MR2)
You also seem to assume that *no* aspects of culture are shared, at
least among people who speak Esperanto. Remember, only a restricted
subset of human cultures are likely to learn it-- I doubt there are any
Yanomamo Esperantists. For that matter, on your own showing
Esperantists have at least one shared cultural phenomenon-- the
Esperanto movement itself.
KM3:
Agreed. And I might add there's quite a lot more to it than outsiders
are aware of; it isn't *just* interlanguage advocacy. It's interesting
and subtle, and (I think) becoming more so.
KM1:(cont. on MR2)
For the sake of the uninitiated, if you
offered me coffee while giving me lunch and I answered,
Cximatene mi havis tason.
(I had a cup this morning.)
you would infer that I was referring to a cup of coffee, that I not only
"had" it but drank it (guessing or knowing the anglicism), that the
coffee was brewed rather than out of the can, and that I didn't want any
more coffee, though none of this was in my utterance.
ID2:(on KM1)
I would interpret "mi havis _x_" as `I had _x_ in my possession' (and
probably still have it, unless it changed owner or ceased to exist).
KM2:
In this *context* you would so interpret it?
ID2:
In English "I had" can mean `I consumed', but this is not a culture-
related inference, it is the polysemy of the word "have". I don't think
Esperanto "havi" has those additional meanings (the library with the
dictionaries, where such things ought to be listed, is too long a walk
away).
KM2:
(I intentionally included an Anglicism which the hearer has to interpret
because the discussion was in the context of Esperanto and these things
happen when Esperanto is used.)
It is not possible to build all implicatures into lexical meaning,
because a given utterance in context has an indefinite number of
implicatures.
ID3:
Yet it is not the case that any word can mean anything, as H Dumpty
would have it.
KM4:
I too disagree with Mr Dumpty: it is not the case that any word can
mean anything. But given appropriate context, any word(s) can give rise
to just about any *implicature.* (For me pragmatics and semantics are
quite distinct; this is not an unusual view.)
KM2:(cont.)
So some of them have to be conversational. As a standard
example, the following, uttered by a helpful bystander to a motorist
whose Hyundai is out of gas:
There's a gas station around the corner.
Implicatures include belief on the part of the bystander that
the station is open
it has gas (the tanks are not empty)
either the person on duty knows how to put the gas in,
or there is a self-serve island
the station owner does not have a policy of not
serving Hyundai owners
the station is not at the time in the process of being
held up by a gang of hoodlums
...
As you can see the list goes on and on; we can establish that all of
these things really are implicated by the utterance by noting the
bizarreness reaction of the motorist upon arriving at the gas station
and finding any of the above propositions to be false. (Or at least we
can perform this as a mental experiment.) After all, the helpful
bystander didn't *say* the station was *not* being held up; etc. etc.
ID3:
Some implicatures are licensed by the language, and
those I lay at the door of lexical meaning. The example with the
petrol station is not language-specific, and should therefore work in
Esperanto as well as in any natural language.
KM4:
Conversational implicatures are in general indeed not
language-specific; this is why the last thing we want to do is to lay
them at the door of lexical meaning. The implicatures in the example
with the petrol station came from the belief-worlds of the
participants in the conversation, something we normally associate with
culture.
ID4:
But do we associate it with a particular culture, or with some universal
feature of verbal communication? Is there a group of people for whom
the question `Is there an xyz nearby?' in the appropriate setting does
not imply `... such that I can take advantage of it'?
ID2:(cont. on KM1:)
I think it is also up to the language whether `a cup' can mean `a
cupful' -- whether you may name the vessel and mean the content. This
kind of thing, too, ought to be mentioned in books.
KM2:
Same point.
ID1:(on MR2, written before KM1 comments above)
Does this imply that they are up to the language? I thought
presuppositions and conversational implicatures were the same, no matter
whether one spoke Esperanto or English. Counterexamples?
MR5:(on the above ID1 and ID2, ID3, KM1, KM2 which followed):
In the case of "know", I agree with you. If _scii_ didn't
assume the truth of the complement, it couldn't be translated "know". I
was quite surprised by Ken's claim that Esperanto has *no*
presuppositions etc.
ID5:
Yes, that's exactly the point that I've been struggling to make.
MR5:
But I doubt that all languages have the *same* presuppositions and
conversational implicatures.
ID5:
I'm not convinced the other way either, it was rather the example with
"know" vs "scii" which led me to make this generalisation.
MR5:
I'd recommend Anna Wierzbicka's
_Cross-cultural pragmatics_ here; whether or not you like her theories
or notation, the pragmatic facts are fascinating.
Examples? How about the French and English exchanges
--Voulez-vous du cafe? 'Do you want some coffee?'
--Merci. 'Thank you.'
Presumably _Merci_ and _Thank you_ mean the same thing, but the
pragmatics differ: the French speaker is declining the offer, the
English speaker is accepting it.
I believe it's been alleged that Grice's rules are culturally variable.
For instance, "Be relevant" and "Be truthful" may be rules in
Anglo-Saxon culture; in some Oriental cultures it'd be "Say what the
listener wants to hear" instead.
ID5:
Hmm. Yes, conversational implicatures can be a strange thing; a culture
may be responsible for a message conveying the exact opposite meaning of
what its semantic content appears to be. The only cure is, of course,
to keep this kind of thing out of a planned language. People certainly
can learn not to accept or decline offers by just giving thanks.
That's even further away from syntactic complexity, though.
MR6:
Which from the point of view of an English or French speaker would
increase the complexity of the language's pragmatics...
Has the Esperanto movement come up with any pragmatic rules for
Esperanto speakers? --that is, any rule that's both pragmatic and
something all or most members of the movement can't simply import from
their native languages?
KM5:(on ID5)
Grice based his conception of conversational implicature on the
fundamental assumption that users of a language are "cooperative." It
has, as Mark suggests, become questionable whether this idea can be
interpreted in a universally valid way. The Keenans have done some
early spadework on Malagasy (there's a nice sketch in one of Tim
Shopen's collections, either _Languages and Their Speakers_ or
_Languages and Their Status_, I'm not sure which one) which suggests
that either "cooperative" means different things in different cultures,
or cultures have different principles governing implicatures.
Brown and Levinson's politeness theory has to my mind shed a great deal
of light on the issue, by showing that the reason we communicate so much
by implicature and by indirect speech acts is that directness and
abruptness is (universally, they would say) impolite. (Their theory is
built on face effects from Goffman and others.) This is very nice
because we are already very much aware of cultural differences with
regard to politeness (maintaining one's own persona and avoiding
affronts to the other guy's). So Brown & Levinson have taken something
hard to understand and related it to something we do have some
understanding of.
SLB1:
Of course, that doesn't address whether politeness, either, is
universally valued. Work on sex differences in communication has shown
that some cultures have blunt, explicit male speech and flowery,
indirect female speech, while others have the opposite. Frequently the
difference is quite pronounced. In all (available) cases, the male
speech pattern is judged to be "better" (i.e., higher status) than the
female speech pattern, by both males and females.
[This led off into a thread on gender differences in language,
most of which had little to do with conlangs.]
KM5:(cont.)
So: as for keeping this kind of thing out of a planned language, I
think it *was* kept out of all of them, or rather, none of it was "put
in." Planned languages have all been constructed on the assumption that
language is pure encoding/decoding. We now think that much if not most
of what is communicated in an utterance (= piece of language in context)
is not in the utterance.
Users of any one constructed language (Esperanto, say) are bound to
share enough culture not to have many problems with pragmatics. But
this does *not* mean that these languages "have" implicatures, etc.!
The pragmatic effects come from a language interacting with the rest of
a culture over a (perhaps long) period of time.
MR5:
Where does this leave Esperanto? I have no idea. I think only
fieldwork among the Esperantists can resolve the question.
KM1:(cont. on MR2)
Any or all of
these inferences would be wrong in a culture that drank coffee out of
gourds exclusively,
ID2:
Not really. The listener would have to interpret your utterance as
meaningful and relevant, and the only way to do this would be to imagine
your cup full of coffee, even if he only drinks it from gourds.
KM1:
or that wasn't aware of the undesirable effects of too much coffee,
ID2:
Which is the culture where a cup in the morning and a cup in the
afternoon counts as too much coffee? Anyway, I would count on your
intonation and facial expression to infer that you mean you're done with
coffee for the day.
KM1:
or in which if you hold a cup in your hand you have to
drink a beverage within 24 hours for good luck.
ID2:
That's too much speculation, isn't it? Our intuitions become fragile
when we strain our imagination too much.
KM2:
Agreed; but that's just what happens when you confront the crucial data
on much of anything in linguistics.