Re: ciska bai tu'a zo bai

[Nick NICHOLAS <nsn@vis.mu.oz.au>]

Hu'tegh! nuq ja' Jorge Llambias jay'?

=la nitcion cusku di'e
=>Oh, pity ye the Nick, who is supposed to cough up a reading list on diachronic
=> functionalism (cedra farvi ke terpli ciksi ke bauske) or grammaticalisation
=> (gervlabi'o pruce) by the end of the month, and hasn't even started, never
=> mind completing Hamlet in Klingon or polishing off the jvoste...

=mi do kecti doi nitcion le nu do kafke bilga
=i pau do ba kafke le tertcidu liste ma

.i .u'i lenu mi pilno le pe'a zei skutadji cu na'e se zanru ci'e la lojban
li'a .ia
.iku'i xuji'a na'e.ei se zanru ci'e le nalritli ke sralo glico
.i bau ri lu ga'u kafke li'u cu sinxa la'ezo cupra

=> There *are* predications where object/event does *not* imply sumti raising,
=> but both object and event are legitimate arguments; the semantics of the
=> predicates are like that.
=Is there any way to tell which are those predications, other than divine
=inspiration?  :)

Well, no. And actually, I'm not convinced there's anything silly about that.
For some concepts, we have an abstract sumti place and a concrete sumti place,
where the concrete is an argument of the abstract's predication. For some of
these, using a different argument of the abstract in the concrete place makes
for a different meaning; in that case, we don't have raising. In others, it
doesn't make any difference, so the meaning is the same; in that case, we
do have raising, and these days we would discard the concrete place as
redundant. I really don't see how else we could do this, if not on a
case-by-case basis. After all, this is Lojban, not Schankian semantics ;)

=> An excellent insight of the Lojban design team,
=> not to read in raising everywhere. Personally, I'm irritated that simlu
=> is not treated as raising, when "seem" is one of the examples of raising
=> that keeps coming up in the textbooks, but never mind.

=>From the definition, it looks like it is thus treated. There is actually
=one separate gismu for each of the meanings:

=simlu: x1 seems to have proprerty x2
=simsa: x1 seems (is similar to) x2

Yeah, but you see, raising is a syntactic, not a semantic property. All the
syntax textbooks I see treat "He seems to be cold" as a raising from "It
seems that he is cold", and if they buy a semantic deep structure, it will
be SEEMS(COLD(he)). If we acknowledged raising here, we'd say {lenu mi
lenku cu simlu} --- since there is no obvious difference between {xy. simlu
lenu catra .y'y} and {.y'y simlu lenu se catra xy.} Well, um. There is a
difference, isn't there? I can see now why Lojbab turned this one down. Hm,
wonder if there's a paper in this. I'll have to read a *lot* more on the
semantic side of raising...

=> I myself use jai obsessively (when I do use Lojban ;(
=I think I have never used it, although I do use tu'a liberally. {jai} has
=the advantage of beign a single syllable, maybe I should start using it.

Maybe not. It's a lot further removed from 'natural' usage, in some ways,
than tu'a.

=> --- it did even pop up in my IRC the other week, and I hope I was being
=> logged); but I remain to be convinced that it will take hold in the speech
=> community.
=The speech community uses it obsessively. From the telephone conversation
=during Logfest, I'd say that for the moment you're the only member.

Alright, alright, language community. Sheesh ;)

=(I was very impressed, btw, I hope I can get to half that level of fluency,
=that was a great incentive.)

.iki'esai do'u do zabnyski mi .i'a.u'i

--
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Nick Nicholas. Linguistics, University of Melbourne.   nsn@krang.vis.mu.oz.au
        nsn@mundil.cs.mu.oz.au      nick_nicholas@muwayf.unimelb.edu.au
            AND MOVING SOON TO: nnich@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au