[Aleader-dev] Re: Pronouns

[Joshua N Pritikin]

[Electricity is restored after a 2 day outage.  Here is a bit
more clarification.]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2003 at 11:14:56PM -0500, William L. Jarrold wrote:
> It seems promising bc it is a doable study -- probably just
> a small tweak from what I did for my dissertation.

Yah, a bare-bones description of my proposal is this:

  Consider sentences which contain exactly two peoples'
  desirability evaluations about the same topic/situation.

> > sentence #1: Tracy wants a banana.
> >
> > pronoun-desirability form:
> >   I (1st person) = Tracy
> >     [will be] happy = want a banana
> 
> Okay, I thought "I" was always 1st person.

Yes, I agree that it is redundent to say "I (1st person)".  This
redundency is just for emphasis.

> [Will be] happy = want a banana.
> 
> Hmm, [foo] means foo is optional in unix or regexp speak I think.  But I
> don't think he means that.  It could be a clarificatory parens, but then
> why not use ( rather than [....

If you like, you can read the square brackets as "stuff which
the editor (me) added to the original sentence."

However, if you want syntactic perfection then look at the
PowerLoom example.

> And sure, if you want X then this sorta equals if you
> get X then you will be happy. Could this be what J is aluding to?

Yes.  :-)

-- 
A new cognitive theory of emotion, http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/aleader