The fuzzy logic of socialised attitudes in Liangshan Nuosu

Liangshan Nuosu (Tibeto-Burman: P.R. China) exhibits two cross-linguistically rare attitude particles which ascribe wishes and fears to an impersonal socialised agent serving as a speaker-hedge. Linguistic properties of these particles not covered by Potts's (2007a,b) features of expressive content are elaborated upon. It is proposed to analyse the Nuosu attitude operators as illocutionary force indicating devices (IFIDs, see Searle and Vanderveken, 1985) and the utterances which host them as speech acts of the expressive type. Success conditions for these speech acts are developed in a fuzzy logic system providing an accurate account of both successful and unsuccessful attitude ascriptions. The fuzzy logic system builds on the distinction between lower-level and higher-level formulae (following Thijsse (1996) and Schwartz (2003)). For lower-level formulae it incorporates a fuzzy epistemic and a fuzzy buletic mode of evaluation. Higher-level formulae are evaluated in a bivalent evaluation mode {. successful, unsuccessful}. © 2010 Elsevier B.V.