I now address the problem of how to decide the wordsocket contents of the three gossip verbs (gossip-good, gossip-honest, gossip-power). Here’s the sentence architecture:
Subject gossips to DirObject that 4Actor perceives good of 5Actor to be 6Quantifier.
What is Subject’s intent here? I think that his intention should be defined in negative rather than positive terms. First, he should pick out his victim, the actor whom Subject wishes to smear. This would be based on the person he likes the least (smallest BSum of pGood, pHonest, and pPower). Once he decides on the victim, then he must decide upon the presentation. Either he represents that the victim has an evil perception of DirObject, or that some third party has an evil perception of the victim. In the former case, victim would be 4Actor and DirObject would also be 5Actor. In the latter case, the victim would be 5Actor and 4Actor would be somebody whom DirObject likes.
These decisions would be made on the basis of Subject’s p3 values for the various actors.
So I will use a RoleActorBox script to select the victim. But I must also figure out in advance whether I should use the direct strategy (victim feels nasty towards DirObject) or the indirect strategy (4Actor feels nasty towards victim). Perhaps I could use a RoleBNumberBox to accomplish this choice, treating it as a boolean. Gad, that would be horribly messy in Sappho. For choosing 4Actor, I’d have to use a PickBestActor with an Acceptable script of true and a Desirable script that uses the RoleBNumberBox to choose one of two calculations, the upper calculation being the how negative Subject’s p3Value for CandidateActor multipled by delta of CandidateActor == victim) towards DirObject is, and the lower calculation being a combination of how negative CandidateActor’s p3Value for victim is. Gad, what a mess!
Some hours later…
Well, I’ve struggled through it, and here are the Acceptable scripts for 4Actor and 5Actor:
I leave it as an exercise for the reader to confirm that these scripts function properly. And if you do, please tell me!
