![]() Like many languages, Spanish has more than one mode of second-person address: tú for intimates and social inferiors, and usted for strangers and social superiors, equivalent to tu and vous in French, and tu and lei in Italian. Spanish, on the other hand, emphasizes modes of being, with two verbs for ‘to be’- ser, to indicate permanent or lasting attributes, and estar, to indicate temporary states and locations. In Russian, verbs include information about completion, with (to simplify a bit) the perfective aspect used for completed actions and the imperfective aspect for ongoing or habitual actions. In Turkish, they also express the source of the information (evidentiality), that is, whether the information has been acquired directly through sense perception, or only indirectly by testimony or inference. In English, verbs express tense, that is, the time relative to the moment of speaking. Equivalent forms in English are more strained and recondite, and less commonly used, for example, ‘Well, as for me, I think that…’ The redoubling, in French, on the first-person personal pronoun seems to inject drama into a conversation, as though the speaker were acting out her own part, or playing up her difference and separateness. This redoubling, this pleonasm, is more a feature of the spoken than the written word, and, depending on the context, can serve to emphasize or simply acknowledge a difference of opinion. But redoubling on the first-person personal pronoun is much more common: Bon aller, moi j’en ai marre. Sometimes, they also redouble on other personal pronouns, Et toi, qu’en penses-tu?. What’s more, French speakers often double up on the first-person personal pronoun, as in Moi, je pense que… with the stress on the moi. English in contrast requires the explicit use of the personal pronoun in all cases, as does French. For example, ‘I want’ in Spanish is simply quiero. Many languages forgo the explicit use of the personal pronoun, which is instead built into the verb. Some languages seem more egocentric than others. One study found that, as a result, English speakers are more likely to remember the agents of accidental events-and, I surmise, to attach blame. ![]() When describing accidental events, English speakers tend to emphasize the agent (‘I fired the gun’) more than, say, speakers of Spanish or Japanese, who prefer to omit the agent (‘the gun went off’). Here’s another, more substantial example. Language is full of built-in assumptions and prejudices of this kind. But of course, as an English speaker, you already knew that, or at least subconsciously. English, for instance, restricts the use of the present perfect tense (‘has been’, ‘has read’) to subjects who are still alive, marking a sharp grammatical divide between the living and the dead, and, by extension, between life and death. As I argue in my new book, Hypersanity: Thinking Beyond Thinking, much of the particularity of a language is extra-lexical, built into the syntax and grammar of the language and virtually invisible to native speakers. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |