TECH: se'i/ro'a

[Nick Nicholas <nsn@MULLIAN.EE.MU.OZ.AU>]

I must apologise for not fully explaining to those who haven't just been
immersed in Pragmatics :) what epistemic and deixis mean.

Deixis is what deictics do, and deictics (ja'ovla) are words that explicitly
or implicitly point to entities in the real world. Personal pronouns do
this, obviously; so do tense words, since tense is relative to a speaker
and/or to the event being spoken of. Spatial deictics, like 'there', exist
too; once again, they are relative to a speaker.

Epistemic means "having to do with knowledge", and epistemic deictics include
attitudinals, evidentials, and such like. Since someone has to do the
knowing or emoting, and that someone is usually the speaker, they too are
deictic. Relativisation of epistemic deixis means that the entity pointed
to by the deictic (the knower of "kau", the observer of "za'a", the pitier
of ".uu") needn't always be the speaker, but can be the person to whom the
current bridi is attributed.

Now we can already (we are told) do relativisation by using {se'i}/{se'inai}.
Thus kause'i, kause'inai. But if it's good enough for {kau}, it should be
good enough for evidentials, and maybe even for attitudinals. So we might
say {ko'a djuno ledu'u le terdi cu cukla za'ase'i/za'ase'inai}: He knows
the Earth is round (I/he has seen this!), or even {ko'a viska lei pindu
.uuse'i/.uuse'inai}: "He sees the poor --- the poor dears! (thought I/he)"

But {.uuse'i} already has a meaning --- it's been used to mean self-pity.
And in general, I think {se'i} will be taken as meaning that the x2 of the
bridi implicit in the UI word is the {sevzi}, not the x1. So we need a
new word to do this work.

Further, observe {ra'o}: this word is also doing relativisation --- of
personal deixis. It means "I repeat your sentence, but I relativise your
personal deictics (pronouns) to be relative to me".

I'm suggesting that a UI cmavo be left in to do epistemic deixis
relativisation. In the case of multiply nested clauses, we'll need an
equivalent to subscripting to identify the right knower with the deictic;
repetation can do the job, as with {sa'a}. I think it's worth considering
whether this deictic, which I'll call {ra'o'o}, is worth merging with {ra'o}
in some grander scheme.

*******************************************************************************
 A freshman once observed to me:         Nick Nicholas am I, of Melbourne, Oz.
 On the edge of the Rubicon,             nsn@munagin.ee.mu.oz.au (IRC: nicxjo)
 men don't go fishing.                   CogSci and CompSci & wannabe Linguist.
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