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The concepting of noticing | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5422 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 33 of 56 11 December 2010 at 8:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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As an aside, this debate reminds me only too painfully that I make a fair number of spelling and syntax mistakes in my posts. Even with use of the spell-checker and multiple previews, I often find mistakes days after the original posit. Is it sheer sloppiness? Probably a bit, but also this is a manifestation of the fact that we see in our writing what we intended to see but not what is really there. This if of course why professional writers use editors or third-party readers who see things differently.
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 34 of 56 11 December 2010 at 2:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
No, that's not the case, and it only serves to demonise grammar. As I said, grammar involves meaning. If you do not express the intended meaning, you've made a mistake. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5422 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 35 of 56 11 December 2010 at 2:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
Nobody is demonizing grammar here. We're simply trying to analyze a situation where speakers are saying things that are can be understood in a way that is unintended. To avoid going around in circles, I suggested use of the term syntax instead of grammar to refer to pure form devoid of meaning. So, something could be syntactically correct but semantically wrong. This is often the case with "false friends" or literal translations. The learner of French who says "Je suis fini" for "I'm finished" is speaking perfectly good French. The only problem is that in French that form really means "I'm kaput or washed up" and not "I've finished the task at hand". In the latter case, one should say "J'ai terminé". How can you tell the true intentions of the speaker? That's the problem. Sure, it's a mistake, but you can't tell unless you have some other information. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5422 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 36 of 56 11 December 2010 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Just to clarify a point in my previous post, I would like to give some examples of this question of syntactic versus semantic correctness. In French, a beginner writing "Il a aller à le bureau" --this is a real example-- would be immediately corrected by a teacher and most software spell-checkers to "Il est allé au bureau" (He went to the office). The correction would be based on pure rules of syntax with no reference to meaning: the verb aller takes the auxiliary être and the past participle allé; the preposition au is used for à le.
If an advanced learner asks "Comment va la chanson?" there would be no correction. In fact, nothing would happen unless further along in the conversation we realize that the person wanted to say "How does the song go?" and instead ended up asking "How is the song doing?" because of incorrectly translating "go" to "aller (va)". By the way, the correct way to ask how a tune goes would be something like, "Elle est comment la chanson?" or "Quel est l'air de la chanson?" Cainntear would say, if I understand his or her's position correctly, that the speaker made a grammatical mistake because they did not use the right form for the intended meaning. I don't agree, but if the word grammar is used in this extended sense, I suggested we use the word syntax with reference to the pure sequences of form and to avoid useless argument. The fundamental issue here is that "Comment va la chanson?" is perfectly good French that no teacher or spell-checker would ever correct unless there is some contextual element that leads us to think otherwise. In Spanish, many learners have a problem with the verbs ser and estar which are both translated by to be in English. Every Spanish grammar book has many pages on how to distinguish these two verbs. While most distinctions are straightforward the real problem arises when the two verbs can be used in the same lexical context but with different meanings. The classic examples are "ser aburrido" (to be boring) and "estar aburrido" (to be bored) or "ser listo" (to be very smart) and "estar listo" (to be ready). Obviously, forms like "Creo que Juan es listo" and "Creo que Juan está listo" are both perfectly valid sentences that have different meanings. How can you tell which one is a mistake? You can't by looking at the syntax level. Therein lies the problem. They are both grammatically or syntactically correct. In a given context, only one is semantically appropriate. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hypersport Senior Member United States Joined 5873 days ago 216 posts - 307 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 37 of 56 11 December 2010 at 8:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Lots of things can have more than one meaning. The context will always give it away.
In your case with the guy in the store it surprises me that you didn't have him clarify what he just told you. The conversation completely changed to something entirely different and you are assuming that it's just another meaning of the word that you didn't recognize that allowed this to happen. Like this is some phenomenon that occurs during conversations and people part ways with completely different ideas of what just transpired. No way. It's one thing to not understand a speaker in your target language and nod your head in agreement faking that you're getting it when the truth is you're only getting bits and pieces. What you've described is not the same. Words don't have "hidden" meanings when surrounded by context and that context is understood. Do you remember exactly what you asked him in Spanish? I could try and make more sense of his initial response if I knew what you asked him. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 38 of 56 11 December 2010 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
Just because you can't tell what the mistake is at the syntax level doesn't mean it's not a mistake. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5422 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 39 of 56 11 December 2010 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
Speaking of syntax and semantics, I can't figure out the meaning of Cainntear's perfectly grammatical sentence here. The first part of the sentence ("Just because you can't tell what the mistake is at the syntax level") would seem to imply there is a mistake at the syntax level, but for some reason nobody can see it. What is the mistake? Does anybody see one? Don't waste your time, there is none. The second part of the sentence ("doesn't mean it's not a mistake") is basically incomprehensible because there is no antecedent for the pronoun "it". What is "it" referring to? Is it some mysterious mistake that nobody can find? Or is it the entire original utterance. Here's how I would have written that sentence depending on my intention. Just because you can't tell what the mistake is at the syntax level doesn't mean the mistake does not exist. Just because you can't tell what the mistake is at the syntax level doesn't mean the sentence is not mistaken. As I have hope to have shown, one can make perfectly grammatical but meaningless utterances. Edited by s_allard on 11 December 2010 at 9:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 40 of 56 11 December 2010 at 9:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think S_Allard is right that you can make perfectly grammatical but meaningless utterances. Some may remember Chomsky's sleeping colorless green ideas - there the mistake was certainly on the semantical level, with at least one and a half flagrant contradictio in terminis (or else it was poetry). However in S_Allard's examples there is not even an error on the semantical level - only situations where it would be a mistake to use one or the other because their meanings are different.
PS: I have a slightly uneasy feeling about the sentence "Just because you can't tell what the mistake is at the syntax level doesn't mean the sentence is not mistaken. ". But "Just because you can't tell what the mistake is at the syntax level doesn't mean the mistake does not exist" is probably correct- even to the extent that there are situations where it might be true. Edited by Iversen on 11 December 2010 at 10:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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