[Lexicog] Deductions - mind or emotions

[Patrick Chew]

Since Dr, Sheynin made comment on how Russian uses the same collocation of
"it seems to me" for feel/think/believe, I'd like to add in some comments
about Korean.

Korean has separate verbs for 'to believe (*in* sth.)' [믿- mit-], 'to think'
[생각 하- saenggak ha-], 'to feel' [느끼- nŭkki-], but none are used in cases of
the "it seems like ..." and your real-life experience with your colleague.
From a quick mental run through of various semantics possible,of the above
verbs, only 'to think' could possibly take a potential/conditional clause,
but since it's extremely abrupt, I cannot imagine anyone ever using it,
unless trying to be confrontational; one would always use "it seems that..."
construction: ...[verb]-[modifier.particle] 'thing' [be.like]-{verbal
ending}.

In the case of a circumlocution, "It seems like you don't know the way", it
would be as follows:

sŏnsaeng.nim-ŭn ka-nŭn kil morŭ.shi-nŭn kŏt kat'-a.yo
teacher.HON-TOPIC go-MOD road not_know.HON-MOD thing be_like-PRES.POLITE
lit.: It is like the teacher does not know the way.
prag. It seems like you do not know the way.

I can only surmise that the semantic fields/valences/etc your colleague may
have associated with the English verbs 'think' 'believe' 'feel' may be
mapped from Korean where 'feel' might be the only option she might have for
this type of evidential frame. I'm surprised the whole "it seems
like/that..." wasn't the initial construction used.

Best regards,
-Patrick Chew





On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 12:11 PM, John Roberts <dr_john_roberts at sil.org>
wrote:

>   I am in Korea at the moment teaching a linguistics course at HanDong
> University. Yesterday (here) one of my Korean colleagues said something
> to me in English that set off a train of thought about how we express
> deduction in English and other languages.
>
> My colleague said "I feel you do not know the way to the faculty
> building." In my mind (not my heart) I flagged this up as a
> collocational clash of "feel" with "know". As a native English speaker I
> would never use "feel" in this context, I would use "think" or "believe"
> to express my deduction. But then I thought, maybe for other native
> speakers of English it would be OK to say "I feel you do not know the
> way to the faculty building." Maybe it is a male/female thing. The
> Korean colleague who said this is female. Or another possibility is that
> it is a politeness thing. Maybe the person who said this is wanting to
> weaken the judgement by using "feel" instead of "think".
>
> Anyway, are there any native English speakers out there who think/feel
> that "I feel you do not know the way to the faculty building" is good
> grammatical English?
>
> Are there any nonnative English speakers out there who think/feel that
> "I feel you do not know the way to the faculty building" is good
> grammatical English?
>
> I would be interested to know how a deduction is expressed in other
> languages. Would you use the equivalent of "think" in English to express
> this or the equivalent of "feel"?
>
> John Roberts
>
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