Grammer and the Train of Thought

Discussion of natural languages, or language in general.
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CatDoom
Avisaru
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Grammer and the Train of Thought

Post by CatDoom »

So, my mom has a bad habit of trailing off after the start of a sentence, leaving the people she's talking to with no idea what she's trying to say until she collects her thoughts and finishes. It's the kind of thing that happens to everyone from time to time, I think; you'll be in the middle of saying something and just lose your train of thought for some reason. It mostly happens to me when I haven't been sleeping well. I don't think this phenomenon is quite the same as when you forget a word; it's not that you know what you want to say but can't find the vocabulary to express it, it's that you forget what you were trying to say altogether, at least momentarily.

Anyway, I was curious if different grammatical structures had any impact on this kind of thing. Do people speaking fusional languages ever say part of a word, then trail off, forgetting what affix they wanted to put on it? Has anybody observed that different components of a sentence are more likely to be forgotten than others, such that people might trail off at different points in the sentence depending on the normal syntax of the language they're speaking?

Just something I was musing about. :)

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Smeric
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Re: Grammer and the Train of Thought

Post by ---- »

Previous research has suggested that words aren't quite segmented in memory as they are in linguistic analyses (that is, words in memory are often, maybe even usually(?) morphologically composite), so I would be very surprised to find out speakers of fusional languages lose their train of thought mid-word.

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finlay
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Re: Grammer and the Train of Thought

Post by finlay »

Sometimes when I'm teaching English my students will say the verb but in a questioning tone to check if they're using the right one or not... but whenever they do this they neglect to finish the sentence and say the object, which is usually important. I wonder sometimes if this is because in Japanese you can almost always do this easily because you've already said the object.

Alon
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Re: Grammer and the Train of Thought

Post by Alon »

In Hebrew, I don't think this ever happens. Of course, Hebrew is nonconcatenative, and the only transparent suffixes are agreement with the subject in past-tense verbs (and Hebrew is underlyingly SVO) and plural and feminine markers on nouns and adjectives. I am told that nonnative speakers of suffixing agglutinative languages, such as Turkish, stumble on what suffix to use, and maybe native speakers trail off too, but in fusional languages, I don't find this likely. For what it's worth, in English, when I trail off, it's always about semantic content rather than grammatical role - I trail off and elide content words and not particles like "already" or "ago" or "instead" or other things that can go after the verb. After all, when I say something, I have a pretty good idea when it happened and who did it, so I'm unlikely to forget the tense/aspect/voice.

Vijay
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Re: Grammer and the Train of Thought

Post by Vijay »

As an Eskimo language, Yup'ik has some pretty long words, but if you stumble over the suffixes, you can't just pick up where you left off; you have start all over again from the beginning of the word instead. (At least this is the case in Cup'ik).

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