'Black Hole' In English Language Is Similar To Asian Language Structure

A language is a set of words strung together in some way or other and it offers most people enough scope for expressing themselves in a more or less adequate sense. If you feel stuck, you can always improve your chances of getting your message across by trying to learn your mother tongue some more. To say that one language is better for expressing human emotions or connects better to people's motivating factors is rendering rather naive assumptions to your general understanding of the human race. It's nevertheless an understandable assumption to make.

After all, the notion is firmly established that someone's verbal package is pretty much determined by their immediate surroundings. But it's time to re-examine this theory. Since the onset of time linguists have pondered the issue of human consciousness and the way various languages manage to capture it. It apparently takes a professional approach to add even more scope for understanding what humans utter by subjecting text and speech to a hoist of tricks. One powerful trick is comparing wildly differing languages.

This offers huge eye openers. Comparing the topic-comment way Asian languages are structured with a syntactical language like English is just one such feast. A topic comment language organizes its sentences into a topic comment or a theme rheme. The topic s the thing being talked about (predicated) and the comment is what is said about the topic, independently of the verb, subject or noun. Analysing the way sentences in English convey their message by means of letting loose the topic comment structure approach on them yields great new ways of assessing the way humans transmit their message in sentences. Any substantive theory about the way our thinking processes are revealed in our language is as rife with speculation as it is with intrigue.

You might wonder how a topic-comment type analysis which is specific to other languages is relevant at all to the English language. It might simply be because deep down, the underlying rationale is that human thought processes are not reflected all that precisely in most languages. However, the English language also contains topic comments. This is most of the time totally different from its syntactical structure, but it nevertheless is a prevalent feature about which hardly anything is apparent.

And why not learn from the way the Japanese convey their messages in order to get to another take on the way they might be conveyed in English sentences? It appears a luring activity. Those scholars that concern themselves with it assert that they derive hidden meanings. This is not to say that by hyper imposing a Japanese roadmap onto the English language offers scope to magically conjure up new revelations. But almost though. Even if the Japanese or other languages would not have topic comment structures, you'd still find these in the English language. They would hardly be any less hidden than they are now. It takes an expert eye, trained in the Asian languages, to 'read' the topic comment structure of your average English line.

The experts differ vastly in their approaches. What comes out of their analysis is generally considered a theory of real gaps in our knowledge of language processing. The real intrigue in this black hole business is that your average English speaker typically encodes their message in a topic comment way, just like the Japanese do standardly. Thomas Price Caldwell, Jr. Professor of International Communications at Meisei University in Japan argues that a syntactic language can be analysed for their 'covert topic comment indications' and, what's more, that topic comment phenomena, properly interpreted, are really symptoms of a deeper and more fundamental level of structuration. Key here is discourse salience, which in its simplest terms, refers to the relevance order of a sentence.

Caldwell says that we are in the habit of thinking that all the relations among the signs at word level are purely syntactic, but that in reality salience order is often completely different from syntactic structure, and that syntax does not always indicate it. Isn't that amusing? What's even more amusing is that the salience is overt in Japanese and covert in English. The Japs trade in the syntax for a heck of a lot of cool information about the world they reside in. Could this be the clue to the love that Japanese tourists so often display for such objects as lamp posts? Contrary to your initial hunch, it appears that topic comment prominent languages like Japanese are possibly better indicators of the way humans convey what they actually mean.

What is for sure is that syntax itself is not at all an indicator of salience, Coldwell says. He believes that syntax might have been derived from salience, which is a generally accepted theory by many scholars. Even the Japanese language itself shows some elementary form of syntax in that some word-order generalizations can be made. For instance they tend to put the verb at the end of the sentence, something that reaks of salience formed syntax. However, the Japanese language is way more known for its apparently total random word order.

Which leaves you as baffled as ever about these people that have the ability to assign instant meaning to lampposts by dint of speaking garble. There is almost as little solid evidence about the way in which the English language actually assigns priority to parts of its sentences. The work carried out to date in the field of topic comment structures is hardly substantial. It is, as with most 'black hole' issues, easiest to trace evidence of such structures buried in our language when the topic comment structures are violated. And of course by the Japanese, who innocently unmask possibly some real gems merely by being clumsy. The overt salience marking system of the Japanese is not available to them in English, and because the Japs do not have any intuitive understanding of the covert marking system in English, it's they that offer the clues here.

Here's a real life example. Be aware however that you have to have been induced into the linguist mindset for a while to immediately see the significance. One day, Caldwell went shopping in Japan and found this slogan on the cover of a notebook; "The notebook having horizontal ruled line and being able to fold up is the best for arranging sentences." Caldwell explains that this sentence sounds totally strange to native English ears because it violates the salience-order rules implied in the English language. He then goes on to demonstrate what the salience order rules are that are implicit in the native English equivalent of the slogan.

The "corrected" version of the sentence, would read like this: A notebook which has horizontal ruled lines and is capable of being folded up is the best for taking notes. The changes required to make this line sound native English are highly indicative of salience ordering having something to do with 1. determiners, as we had to change "a" to "the".2. plurality, as we had to change "line" to "lines".3. specificity, as we had to change "arranging sentences" to "taking notes."So prior to translating the line into the native English version has taught us a lot about things that are so engrained in us, it takes a foreign approach to see why they evolved in the first place.

The first thing the Japanese bumbling baffoons teach us is that English uses determiners to referee greater or lesser degrees of determinacy and specificity to provide means for our unconscious expression of the salience. Secondly, distinctions of number also have a role in distinguishing degrees of determinacy, within patterns which are likewise unconscious for English-speaking people. And since native speakers of Japanese don't use determiners or plural markers, it is no wonder that they have an especially difficult time in mastering the covert English saliency system.

These findings might not strike the average person as highly revelatory of any great depth that is hidden in the English language. Yet, you have to imagine that these are structures that normally go by unnoticed. For otherwise imperceptible markers, the range of these of these qualifications is quite impressive. They are also qualifications that the Japanese manage to do entirely without. Bizar little ole world. For more information on the way linguists research approaches to topic comment issues in the English language, read this article

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