Re: We haven't got up to 'yes" yet!
Posted: Sat Jan 05, 2019 8:11 pm
Cavesa wrote:And some of the weird turns of this whole discussion were not only the insistence on "the book is red" being unnatural, but also the assumption such a sentence was taught in isolation. And then we were suddenly imaging weird people asked to imagine the meaning of "the book is red" in vacuum, without any hint and context.
Nope. You're misinterpreting. I still have a problem with zenmonkey's example, because "the book is red" remains unnatural -- we don't repeat like that -- "the book" should be "it".
As Random Review says, we've got to remember that we're the survivors -- we've managed to learn in spite of the weaknesses. We can't just pretend those weaknesses aren't there.
And one of those weaknesses is that language is often presented as a puzzle. Most of us like intellectual puzzles, so we are happy decoding the rules -- we use the conciously constructed examples with their unnatural repetitions and redundancy as the data for the puzzle.
But not everyone does that. Some people's reaction to artificial redundancy is to just think that they're wasting their time learning the language, because the language is boring and slow.
(Of course, it bears repeating that the solution to this is not the communicative approach -- that's just a superficial attempt to use situations instead of meaningful language, and it just shifts the unnaturalness to somewhere else.)