Re: ciska bai tu'a zo bai

[Colin Fine <C.J.Fine@bradford.ac.uk>]

Jim Carter proposes:
To muddy the waters even further, let me float something past.  An
attitudinal is usually "about" some referent, e.g. someone is happy or
someone is humble or someone has high status (relative to some second
argument?)  Let's forget about the long-frozen grammar and interpret
the attitudinal as being attached to a specific sumti in the same
manner that a <BAI> might be, rather than to an arbitrary word.  Then
obviously the attachee is the referent. As a special case, attitudinals
attached to a main or subordinate bridi would refer to the speaker, or
possibly for ga'i it might refer to the listener (addressee).


NO NO NO!!!!!

This is an obvious extension, which I suspect most of us have thought
of from time to time.

I resist it strongly, because it doesn't make psychological sense.

The plain fact is that I CAN know what my own attitudes or emotions are,
but I CANNOT know what anybody else's are (I can make guesses or assumptions,
I can deduce from their behaviour, and they can even tell me, but they
might be lying). There is thus a fundamental difference between expressing
my attitudes and anybody else's.

I accept that this claim does not ipso facto rule out extending UI to
apply to other entities than the speaker; but I think that UI do a very
special thing, and I do not want to see them extended to something that
is superficially similar to their basic use, but actually radically different.

I'm glad I have realised this, because it makes clear to me why I am
unhappy with the 'empathy' marker (dai?); but at least that has an explicit
marker.

        Colin Fine