Re: kau and jai issues

[nsn@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au (Nick Legend Nicholas)]

Hu'tegh! nuq ja' Logical Language Group jay'?

God rest ye merry, gentlemen! I'm on a ten-day hiatus between my thesis binge
and my studentship with Microsoft; I've decided to play catch-up with my
4000 outstanding mail messages, although god wot how far I'll get with my
Lojban backlog, since, for me to say anything intelligent, I'll have to
bone up a lot more on my formal semantics. (I do know a bit on pragmatics ---
Levinson's book is a great intro --- but these questions that are coming
up, on veridicality and indirect questions, need a lot more formal stuff.
My formal semantics textbook has no mention of indirect questions, so this
would necessitate a library search, which I'm unlikely to get done in a 
hurry; I hope pc can do justice to the topic.)

On kau, I'll respond later. On jai:

=wrt jai, I notice briefly that Nick seems to almost always express agentives
=explicitly with jaigau, and indeed almost all of his usages of jai are with 
=a following tense/modal.  This tends to provide usage evidence against the
=assumption that normal usage assumes jai is the agentive unless specifically
=marked, since tu'a Nick IS normal usage in this matter.  (Or is that
=Nick jaigau normal usage %^).

There is an extremely simple reason you won't find bare jai in my texts: most
of them were written *before* bare jai was invented (though, as you'll recall,
I was advocating such a converter for a very long time.) I quite strongly
suspect that, had I access to bare jai, I *would* use it more often than
not for agentives, since it's agentives, after all, that get raised more often
than not.

Jorge had specific questions on my usage; I'll now answer them.

-- 
 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ @
 Nick Nicholas. Melbourne University, Aus. nsn@speech.language.unimelb.edu.au
                                    ---
"Some of the English might say that the Irish orthography is very Irish.
Personally, I have a lot of respect for a people who can create something so
grotesque."
-- Andrew Rosta <ucleaar@UCL.AC.UK>, <9307262008.AA95951@link-1.ts.bcc.ac.uk>