We don’t always say exactly what we mean, and it has nothing to do with being polite. A new study suggests that the order in which we construct our thoughts is consistent, regardless of the language we speak.
“He drinks water,” is what English speakers say, using the grammatical setup that consists of subject-verb-object. Yet that is not necessarily what we think.
Instead, according to a team led by University of Chicago researchers, humans may impose a natural order on events, thinking of them in terms of subject-object-verb.
The researchers recruited speakers of English, Mandarin Chinese, and Spanish, all of which use the subject-verb-object construction. They also gathered participants who spoke Turkish, which orders sentences as subject-object-verb. The participants were shown a series of illustrations and asked to communicate the scenes depicted using only gestures. The resulting nonverbal communication was predominantly comprised of subject-object-verb order, regardless of the speaker’s language.
These findings suggest that natural order may be rooted in our brains, and could also help explain why newly developing sign languages use a consistent word order. Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language, spoken by an isolated community with a high incidence of deafness, originated only 70 years ago. Within one generation, the language had taken a subject-object-verb construction.
The results may also give insight into findings from co-author Susan Goldin-Meadow’s own study from over 30 years ago. In 1977, she found that American deaf children who have not learned spoken or conventional signed language create their own gestural language to communicate, placing object before verb.
Why then do some languages defy our natural ordering impulse? Although this is still unclear, cultural forces may play a role. While new languages employ object-verb order to be clearly and efficiently processed, as language’s function becomes more complex with time, structure can change. As if English didn’t already have enough tricks.
Image: iStockphoto
July 2nd, 2008 at 10:27 pm
This is an interesting idea. On the other hand, it seems possible that the order in which someone expresses the parts of speech could be influenced more by the mode of expression than by his or her own formation of the thought. Communicating is like revealing a story, so why should we accept that the way someone communicates something is indicative of the way their mind would have formed the idea.
As an example, imagine that you want to draw a cartoon showing Captain Ahab swinging his pail about. A likely first frame or two would consist of Ahab, or the pail, or the pair of them, to establish the players. Then the following frame could illustrate the swinging quite chaotically without fear of a reader failing to understand the who and the what.
Maybe this is a more applicable example: consider a person who is developing a vocabulary of physical gestures and has no prior knowledge of any sign language. In the primitive form of communication that is likely to ensue, the differences between the verbs “to swing” and “to hit” may be too subtle to clearly distinguish between them as isolated gestures. For this reason, if they wanted to express the idea “The captain swings the pail,” one could argue that it is more fruitful to express the verb only after the nature of the object has been roughly established, as this would help clarify the intent of the verb.
I realize that you can argue in the reverse direction as well, so that the swinging informs us of the nature of the pail, but there may be a slight difference. Subjects and objects often exist physically in proximity to a conversation which references them, whereas verbs exist only in execution. Thus nouns might be easier to establish by context.
Anyway, it just seems like there are more ways to interpret data like that which the research describes. Still pretty interesting.
July 6th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
This is quite understandable, if you accept the assumption that in a proper core ontology (AI) consists of object, property and relation only. In defining grammar people spent too much time on syntax (rules) and morphology, whereas we can think without words, just as animals. Relations are normally verbs, where a verb can have a subject and an object in a VP format, which is a message. All other word clusters are labels, headings or titles, noun phrases in other words. But relations are normally hidden, this is why they are the subject of all science. Mathematics is the science of relations, and all relations may be simplified to the basic equal/identical or non equal/identical equation.
Therefore until you do not start exploring how our mind works with those three categories, you will not be able to disclose and show the chains of relations of objects, properties and relations. If you are interested in hearing some more, write to me.