LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.08 (01) [E]

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07 December 2005 * Volume 09
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From: Cullin Feddema <cufeddema at yahoo.de>
Subject: LL-L "Semantics" 2005.12.07 (06) [E]
  From: Gustaaf van Moorsel
  Subject: LL-L "Semantics" 2005.12.07 (02) [E]
  benden/bendes - I don't think I have never heard 'benden' before
That is funny. To me, 'benden' is the correct form. I would say 'bendes' 
sounds silly or childish.

Groetnis,
Cullin

----------

From: Kevin and Cheryl Caldwell <kevin.caldwell1963 at verizon.net>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.07 (08) [E]

> From: Ben J. Bloomgren <Ben.Bloomgren at asu.edu>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.07 (01) [E]
>
> Most post war English publications have 'lighted' in print - yet listen to
> a
> book being read aloud - on the radio for example, and you will hear only
> lit.
>
> Sandy and all, there is a weird one that I only hear in one environment -
> baseball. Flew is the past tense of to fly, but for some seemingly odd
> reason, baseball announcers, players, etcetera say flied. Barry Bonds hit
> a
> homerun and flied out to center field. At least to me, on the other hand,
> it
> would sound extraordinarily weird to hear Gregg Shulty of the Diamondbacks
> say, "Barry Bonds hit a homerun and flew out to center field." It seems
> that
> flied has a specialized meaning in baseball; he hit the ball, and the wind
> carried it to center field whereas flew would mean that he became 鹏 (péng,
> a
> large, fabulous bird with extraordinary flying powers) and flew to center
> field. Is that a good way to look at it?
> Ben

Yes, that's a good way to look at it. More specifically, "flied out" means 
he hit a fly ball that was caught for an out, as opposed to "lined out" (he 
hit a line drive that was caught before it hit the ground) or "grounded out" 
(the ball bounced before it was caught and the fielder threw the ball to 
first base to put the batter out) or "fouled out" (he hit the ball into foul 
territory and it was caught there before it hit the ground).

Kevin Caldwell

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From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.07 (01) [E]

Hello all,

Sandy Fleming wrote:

> "George sat on a chair."
> "Little Miss Muffet is a wimp."
> "She sat criying her eyes out."
> "Show me the box and wrappiing."

> "Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet, eating her curds and whey."

But how do you get from the exemplars to "Little Miss Muffet sat on a
tuffet, eating her curds and whey."? It seems obvious to you because you
already know the language. It would be a lot less obvious if the
examples were in an unknown language. "She sat crying her eyes out"
employs a construction that does not exist in German, and mechanical
translation would not be right. (Witness the famous manuals 'translated'
from Japanese). And how come you can't say

"Cry her eyes out"
or
"Her eyes out is a wimp".
Both are allowed by your exemplars.

Another example. Valid exemplars would include:
"I'll look the name up" (e.g in a book)
"I'll look up the name" (same sense)
"I'll look up the street" (i.e. i'll see what's happened down the road)

but you can't say
"I'll look the street up"
or
"I'll climb the mountain down"

> Like I've said, the rules created by neural nets aren't the
> rules of grammar (or juggling, or whatever). Each person's brain
> probably contains its own rules for manipulating language. They might
> give the same results, but it doesn't mean they're using the same rules.

Every person's language is very slightly different from everybody else's
- everybody has their own idiolect. Everybody has their own personal
internal representation of the structure of English, the results of
which differ very slightly from everybody else's, just as e.g. everybody
has a slightly different set of associations for the word 'mother'
depending on their family history and personal experiences but there is
a common core of meaning. English can be defined as what is in some
standard English grammar (prescriptive) or it can be defined as the
language of the English speaking community, which is a more modern
viewpoint (at least I thought it was). I'm also not saying that the
brain necessarily works directly with the 'rules' - it might just be a
giant associative neural net, it could be tiny little green men with
pointy hats, but what comes out of people's mouths has structure which
is a result of whatever goes on inside that grey matter, and syntax
tries to describe that structure, and it allows the "equivalent"
structures of different languages to be compared and contrasted.

> It's a bit like in computer programming: ask two procrammers to write a
> wordprocessor from scratch, according to a precisely defined
> specification, the results may (or may not!) be as specified, but the
> chances of their code being the least bit similar is remote (aside from
> any common engineering techniques they've referred to).
>
Sorry this is a really bad example for you :-) Programming languages are
defined syntactically, using context-free phrase-structure grammars.
Both programmers must obey the syntax otherwise the compiler will not
understand the program. They may produce different programs (sentences)
to achieve the same results (semantics), but they must follow the same
syntactic rules of the computer language or it's no-go. Humans are more
flexible and can usually adjust to even quite severe errors. But the
programmers (assuming they are experienced) do not think in terms of the
syntax of the programming language but in terms of what they want to
accomplish - their use of the correct syntax is internalised and they
are only aware of syntax when they make mistakes. And when you teach a
programmer you give him example programs and then teach her/him the
formal rules that the example programs embody, you wouldn't just present
them with a syntax diagram or grammar.

  Modern syntax is complicated mainly because human languages are
complicated, not because grammarians like to appear clever by imposing
complexity upon simplicity.

> phonology, semantics, morphology, interfaces and so on. They're all very
> different sets of rules but closely interconnected (for example, the
> more morphology in a language, the less syntax and vice versa, as a
> rule).
I don't think that this is necessarily the case. Latin or Russian have
as much syntax as Chinese. They are connected in that morphology
expresses syntactical relationships. Less morphology tends to mean
stricter word order, because word order can be used in lieu of
morphology to express those syntactic relationships. Not necessarily the
other way round, since some inflected languages have strict word order

> It is important not to confuse a description of a thing with the way the
> thing works. Remember the problems we used to have in physics when we
> thought space was flat?
I'm not quite that old :-)

Bye, Paul Tatum.

----------

From: Paul Tatum <ptatum at blueyonder.co.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Semantics" 2005.12.07 (06) [E]

Well Gustaav and Jacqueline,
thanks for the replies. Dutch seems to have quite a strong difference
between 'ordinary' language and formal language. And quite a lot of
nouns with double plurals. I can only think of brothers/brethren in English.

I definiitely prefer de muzikanten van de hoempaband, I find it hard to
sit still while listening to de musici van het concertgebouworkest

 > I hope this sets you straight on the torturous route towards learning
 > Dutch.
 > Succes ermee! Jacqueline
la lucha continua!

  Paul Tatum

----------

From: Sandy Fleming <sandy at scotstext.org>
Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.07 (08) [E]

> From: Jacqueline Bungenberg de Jong <Dutchmatters at comcast.net>
> Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2005.12.07 (01) [E]
>
> Sandy, I think that is very interesting. Since English is one of the
> "Germanic" languages that insists on putting the verb between subject and
> object in declarative sentences, and I would assume that BSL has been
> developed by and for English users of sign language, why would they
> insist
> on using a different syntax from the written or spoken language. What are
> the advantages of such a ploy? I am curious, Jacqueline

In the past, most people were illiterate, and the Deaf had even less
education than the Hearing, so BSL developed in isolation from English
(though presumably, like English, repeated invasions have given it a
complex history of its own).

So BSL, apart from modern English influences, has no relationship to
English.

There are quite strong reasons why BSL doesn't change to be more like
English.

One is that Deaf people can't hear (I keep having to remind people of
this!) so that learning English is a bit like learning Japanese from the
script alone. Many Deaf people of average education don't make a good
job of writing English. One reason for that is, ironically, that many
teachers in the UK insist on teaching only English to Deaf children, and
no BSL, with the result that they have no complete language to use in
communicating the rather difficult ideas involved in learning English
via script and speech therapy. More modern theories say that if you
learn one language properly early enough then you can learn any later
on, whereas if you don't, you'll never learn to either speak or sign
properly. But it seems that while the Deaf can't hear, some education
authorities, and even some teachers, don't want to. There's nane sae
deif as winna hear, as we say in Scots  :)

The other reason I have in mind is purely linguistic. Imagine you're
trying to describe a drum sound in English. You might say:

"It was three short, light beats followed by a heavy beat and then a
cymbal sound."

or you might just say:

"It went rat-at-a-boom-tsh!"

The first version is very long but can be analysed according to English
grammar. The second (onomatopoetic) version is very short, the grammar
is very different and you couldn't do a proper analysis of how meaning
was expressed here without considering how the actual sounds of the
"words" relate to the reality being described.

This second version is possible because the thing being described is a
sound, and the English language uses sound as its medium. However, most
things we converse about are perceived visually, so onomatopoeia isn't
usually the best way to try to describe them in English.

But BSL uses a visual medium, so there is practically always scope for
using (visual) onomatopoeia to describe things!

This means that, like the second example above, BSL tends to be much
briefer than English, and also that BSL grammar is much more closely
coupled with semantics (or even reality) than English grammar is.

There is a form of signed language known as "Signed English", which is
English signed word-for-word using BSL signs, plus signs invented for
English words that don't exist in BSL. As you might expect from the
above description, it's tedious. In fact it's so tedious it's almost
never used in conversation, but only for teaching Deaf children English.

Another form of signed language is "Sign Supported English" (SSE), the
idea being to speed up communication by dropping all the "invented" or
"purely English" signs while still following word order. But this
remains tedious and moreover isn't as clear as either English or BSL.
These are both clear:

"It was three short, light beats followed by a heavy beat and then a
cymbal sound."
"It went rat-at-a-boom-tsh!"

But the SSE is neither short nor clear (the lack of such subtleties as
rhythm, stress and tone doesn't help, either):

"That three quick airy hit hard hit round-thing noise."

There's another reason why BSL is very brief: there are various
simultaneous channels of expression in BSL (there are in spoken
languages too, eg rhythm, stress, tone, gesture, but not heavily used
for lexical items and morphemes as in BSL). For example, if we want to say:

"He agreed grudgingly"

This is one sign, and indeed everything is simultaneous and signed in a
moment, not like a single word of five sequential syllables! Just to
describe it so that you understand, "agreed" is signed with the hands -
make two "thumbs-up" signs in front of your chest and immediately bring
your hands together to contact at the middle bones of the fingers. At
the same time, glance to the side with the eyes only to indicate "he",
and wrinkle your nose and press your lips together to indicate
"grudgingly". With this one sign on the hands, the head can be used to
sign all sorts of agreement:

"He agreed grudgingly."
"I agreed to put up with it."
"Do you agree?"
"He disagrees."
"I agree to some extent."

More examples, to give the full flavour of the language...

Suppose you're talking about a family, say, a husband, wife and two
children. The first time you sign husband, you might point or glance to
the left slightly, and you mention the wife and children and point or
glance to the right. The positions them in your mind's eye, and in the
"listener"'s mind's eye. Thereafter, you can glance to the left when
talking about the husband, to the right when talking about the wife, and
to the right and downwards when talking about the children. This is how
pronouns work in BSL.

Similarly, suppose two people are comparing the merits of electricity
and gas. Though these are abstract ideas, the signers will soon
establish, as above, that electricity is to the right (say) and gas to
the left. Thereafter to say "Gas is cheap, electricity is expensive",
they only have to sign:

"Expensive, cheap"

with a glance to the right on the first sign, and a glance to the left
on the second. The strong spatial or semantic coupling with syntax makes
for clarity and brevity which just can't be achieved with SSE.

Here's an example of a more (visually) onomatopoetic sentence. On
Saturday a Deaf man said to me:

"I went to Guernsey on the boat. I saw the full moon rising over the
horizon, it was beautiful."

So he signed it as follows:

been Guernsey-over-there boat-sailing-to-over-there full-moon
I-saw-curve-of-the-crown-of-the-moon-slowly-rising-above-the-horizon,
beautiful

Only six signs, leaving a very clear picture in the mind! Most of this
is signed with the hands, but the "over-there" and "I-saw" are signed
simultaneously with the eyes. He signs "full-moon" and then in the next
sign I see his left arm representing the horizon while a curved right
hand is used for the top of the moon.

You'll notice that the syntax is partly dictated by the semantics here.
He has to sign the object (full-moon) before the verb
(curve-of-the-crown-of-the-moon-slowly-rising-above-the-horizon)
otherwise I won't know what his curved hand is supposed to represent (
part of the full moon).

This takes us back to the "cake eats girl" incident:

"Cake girl eat."
"Girl cake eat."

both mean the same thing, thanks to a bit of common sense or cultural
agreement. But I said the verb has to come after the object. This is
because the verb "eat" varies in BSL according to what's eaten: a piece
of cake, a slice of pizza, a potato crisp, dinner with fork and knife,
they're all held in different ways. And just as I can't tell what the
man's curved hand was before he signs "full moon", I can't tell what the
girl's hand is supposed to be holding until the sign for "cake", "pizza"
or whatever, has been made, so the verb must come after the object!

Of course this is basic grammar, and as in English or any other language
you can always vary the meaning by putting the words in less-usual
orderings. And there are other sign languages that follow quite
different ordering rules. But I'd normally expect stronger coupling
between reality and grammar in sign languages, due to the prevalence of
onomatopoeia.

That's why English and BSL are very different, and likely to remain so!

Sandy Fleming
http://scotstext.org/
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cochlear_my_eye/ 

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