[Aleader-dev] Re: Pronouns

[William L. Jarrold]

On Sat, 18 Oct 2003, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:

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

Cool!...Btw, this weekend, I just re-watched Richard Attenbourough's
_Ghandi_.  A very moving very well done portrayal of "Bapu's" life.  At
least in my opinion.  So, seeing all that "third worldness" I was kinda
sorta "there" with the blackout.

>
> 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.

Okay.  Yes, a good theory of mind would be able to generate believable
affective evaluations from any perspective.  Perspective (e.g. whether it
is from Mommy's eyes, or Tracy's eyes, or the readers eyes) should be
a parameter that delineates the range of sentences that comprise
the items we use in our experiment...Perspective taking ability is a
key function of the TOMM and is also what is believed to be impaired
in Autistic Spectrum Disorders....If this is congruent with your
thinking then we are on "the same page", i.e. I'm pretty well getting
what you have to say.

>
> > > 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.

You said that before (-;.

>
> > [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.

Cool.  Powerloom.  I look forward to seeing that.  Dunno nuthin'
'bout Powerloom.

>
> > 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
>