Cowan on deixis

[John Cowan <snark!cowan@GVLS1.VFL.PARAMAX.COM>]

:0a
Since the preceding messages are a confused mess of proposals and
retractions and over-complex examples, I will attempt to write from
scratch what I think the story is.

Meta-note on direct quotation:  Lojban direct quotation with "lu...li'u"
or "lo'u...le'u" represents what the quotee said, and so ignores all
consideration of the quoter.  Some of Nick's examples translated English
indirect discourse with Lojban direct quotation, leading to confusion.

Temporal deixis:  Absolute.  All tenses in Lojban refer to the current
space-time reference, which is the speaker's unless reset.  So:

        ko'a pu cusku le se du'u ko'a ca klama le zarci

means that she said (in the past) that she was going to go (in the speaker's
present) to the store.  With a clever use of "ki", we can change to
relative deixis:

        ko'a puki cusku le se du'u ko'a ca klama le zarci

has "ki" locking in the "pu", which causes the later "ca" to be interpreted
as "puca" which is just "pu" (given the aorist nature of pu/ca/ba).
We could turn off the "ki" for later sentences by appending "kei kiku"
to the above.  (At this point, jimc will start making remarks about stacks.
I will confine myself to the observation that human beings don't have
very deep ones.)

Personal deixis:  Absolute.

        ko'a cusku le se du'u mi klama le zarci

means that she said I went to the store, as in English.  (I heard a claim
once that Esperanto has relative deixis in this situation: that "John said
that I went to the store", literally translated, comes out meaning that
John said John went to the store.  I couldn't get this confirmed:  is it
really true?)

Epistemic deixis:  Relative, in my opinion.  I, of course, absolutely
deny that "kau" means "(known!)" or anything like it; it refers to identity,
not knowledge.

        la djan. te preti la djim. le se du'u la .an. klama le zarci mu'i makau
        John is-the-questioner of-Jim on-the statement-that Ann
                goes to-the market with-motive what? [indirect]

means "John asked Jim why Ann went to the store", and says nothing about
the state of knowledge of John, Jim, Ann, or the speaker.  Note that I don't
believe "cpedu" is relevant to questions; it means "ask for", not "ask".

I think the fact that "kau" belongs to UI is irrelevant.  While it is
true that the attitudinal members of UI are absolute, that does not apply
to all members.  For instance,

        la .an. cusku lo'u ko'a du ko'e du ko'i le'u na'i
        Ann said [opaque-quote] X is Y is Z [unquote] [bogus!]

the >judgment< of metalinguistic error is made by the speaker, but the
error itself is attributed to Ann.  Note that "lo'u", glossed "[opaque-quote]"
here, does not itself reflect an error, as earlier documents implied; it may
be used for quoting fragments of errorless discourse that are not by themselves
grammatical:

        ko basygau lo'u me le le'u lo'u me lo le'u
        Replace "me le" with "me lo".

If somebody wanted to bother, a far more restrictive grammar could be
defined for "kau", putting it in its own KAU selma'o.  (The natural places
would be:  after KOhA, after GOhA, after any kind of logical/non-logical
connective, after a quantifier, after a lerfu string, after FA or tag,
and after "xu" and "pei", which would have to be split from UI/CAI into a
new XU selma'o.)  But what's the point?  The current over-flexibility
works well enough, and allows one to suggest a possible value or range of
values.

--
John Cowan      cowan@snark.thyrsus.com         ...!uunet!lock60!snark!cowan
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban.