You can respond to one of the question or to all of them.
Question 1a. Which differences exist in the expression of time between English and your other language (of course, if your other language is Chinese, we already know from Ch. 15!).
Question 1b. Did you glean any pedagogical insights for teaching the encoding of time (or tense/aspect) in your professional language from the readings?
Question 2. Think about how the animals used to study the relationship between gender and bilingualism are usually portrayed in children’s books in English and other languages that you know (in terms of gender, e.g., clothing, names, roles, etc.). Is there gender consistency within and among the languages? Would this have implications for the findings of the study in Ch.16?
Question 3. What is an emblematic gesture? How is it different from the sense attributed to the term “gesture” in the work of scholars like McNeill who use gestures to study the expression of motion, for example? http://mcneilllab.uchicago.edu/writing/topics.html
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November 10, 2011 at 8:06 pm
Lance Armistead
One major difference in the expression of time between English and Spanish exists in the expression of aspect. Specifically, Spanish has one specific “past tense” to mark imperfective aspect and another to mark perfective aspect. English is able to describe imperfective aspect in the past, but does not have one specific way to do it. For instance, “I was eating” and “I ate” both could be used to describe this aspect, depending on the context. “I ate” however, could also describe the perfective aspect. Often, English requires context to communicate whether someone is talking about the perfective or imperfective aspect in the past.
For this reason, native English speakers have a notoriously difficult time distinguishing these two past tense aspects in Spanish. Teachers try to give rules of thumb, but these are generally half-truths and result in morphological errors on the part of the student. For instance, many students think of “tener” (to have) as a verb that requires imperfective aspect because “having” seems ambiguous in terms of time. They have difficulty seeing that “tener” in the past tense/perfective aspect can mean that someone began to have something (i.e. received it). Therefore, they often memorize that preterit (past/perfective) tense of “tener” means “to receive” when the verb really does not change meaning.
November 11, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Anastasia Sorokina
Russian language marks completeness and incompleteness of an action on verbs. If I say “begat’”, it means to run in general without any purpose or desire to complete the action. If I say “pribezhat’”, it means to reach a specific goal, to get somewhere by running. It relates to the concept of time, because the first form does not specify for time, but the second one does – the action is complete.
English does not quite have that. You can say “I run” to mean that you run in general. You can say “I have run”, which means that I have completed running. There are differences in meaning between those 4 constructions in Russian and English. Russian emphasizes the result, English – process. Moreover, they are expressed differently: with prefix in one, with an auxiliary in another.
November 12, 2011 at 11:53 pm
Caleb
emblematic gestures are iconic, with shared conventions across all speakers of that language community, and because these iconic gestures are so readily recognized, they can be used on their own, as well as in tandem with verbal language. McNeil’s research focuses only on the ways body langauge often seems to synchronize with speech, syllable by syllable, because “McNeill claims that the extremely close synchrony between gesture and speech indicates that the two operate as an inseparable unit, reflecting different semiotic aspects of the cognitive structure that underlies them both ..”
It’s not clear to me whether or or not McNeil’s theory and emblematic gesture theory assume similar ideas that gesture and speech share referents to some common pre-lexical cognitive structure. The book only says “…the meaning of emblematic gestures can be rendered into words”, but we don’t know much about whether or not this theory believes translation of gesture into word equivalents is arrived at by following the same same underlying path or perhaps arrive at the same verbal destination via (slightly) different paths through the cognitive structures.
But the idea of analyzing language from a multi-modal perspective as a means of triangulation is intriguing. “To a linguist, however, perhaps the most compelling implication of the proposal that gesture and speech are different expressions of the same conceptual content is that gesture can be used to access information about language. If gesture and speech are a single system, analysis of gesture can eliminate some of the circularity involved in using speech as a primary data-source for the study of language.” The only catch is that the assumption about multiple modes of communication (linguistic and body) operating on same, similar, or different cognitive paths needs to be clearly examined and proven in order to draw valid conclusions. A similar criticism is true for using speech-only approaches to understand language.
The inherent circular reasoning can lead to invalid conclusions. And so it makes me think that we need more and better research at the cognitive and neurological levels to continue to help us get closer to really understanding what’s going on.
November 13, 2011 at 11:51 am
Yanjin Li
Q1a: Besides Chinese and English, the only language I know is Japanese. Unlike Chinese, Japanese has different temporal phase for past, present and future. The only difference between English and Japanese on the domain of interpreting tense is that there is no past perfect tense in Japanese. Similar to English, in Japanese, inflection and a combination of inflection and grammatical words are also applied to express different tense. However, there is a salient difference between Japanese and English: the order of inserting verbs into a sentence is different. In English, verbs follow the subject; however in Japanese, verbs are put at the end of a sentence. As a result, unless you finish reading a sentence, you have no idea whether it is a negative one or a positive one.
Q1b: To be honest, I cannot imagine how I should teach the time concept in Chinese because the way of encoding time has been internalized into my mind. It penetrates into the way when I think of time and tense, it also affects how I interpret time in a subcutaneous way. Native speakers of a language can never understand the obstacles and difficulties faced by learners of this language. Especially in the field of grammar, I prefer a L2 teacher who comes from the same language background as I do, because native speakers internalized grammatical rules at a very young age, thus they do not know how to explain those rules without training. However, even though a native speaker teacher is well qualified on teaching this language to non-native speakers, she/he still does not understand the hardship of learning this language that is frequently experienced by the students who speak another language.
Personally speaking, when I teach the tense and aspect of time in English, I usually draw a timeline, and I call it “the train of time”. On top of it, I will mark the corresponding tense to each specific time (e.g. 8pm yesterday) as well as to each time period (e.g. in the last three years). Then I will sort my students in different groups and ask them to finish a task of telling their group members their life in the past academic year by using all the tense we just learnt. At last, each group will pick up an interesting story and make a poster together.
November 13, 2011 at 9:26 pm
Karen Graf
I think most people outside the realm of bilingual research and teaching might assume that all languages possess the same ability to encode temporal phases of an action and do so in the same manner. In reading the study on the Chinese-English bilinguals’ sensitivity to the differences in the two languages in regards to encoding temporal relations in an event, I think that the best pedagogical approach would be to present and carry out target language activities in the classroom in a highly contextualized and communicative manner. These differences also made me reflect upon the way in which time and temporal phases are carried out in Spanish. Although there exists both a present and future tense in Spanish that are very similar to English, the present tense is used much more in informal and familiar language contexts even when referring to an event in the future. For example, “¿Me haces un favor?” = Can/Will you do me a favor? would be used in the present tense (referring to the future) even though the equivalent “¿Me harás un favor?” exists in the future tense (but would almost never be used). While it’s easy to say that the only way L2 students of Spanish can acquire this ability to choose correctly between the present and future tense is through studying and/or living abroad, I believe it is incumbent upon us as language instructors to provide as much TL input in a contextualized manner as well as opportunities for communication and interaction in situations and contexts in which these differences in language can occur.
November 14, 2011 at 1:07 am
Jialing Wang
All the children’s books I read when I was a kid were all written in Chinese, a language has no GG. But as stories in other GG languages, the animals in Chinese children’s books also have genders. And interestingly, some animals’ and objects’ genders are commonly accepted. For example, tiger and wolf are masculine, rabbit and snake are feminine. Wood is masculine, flower is feminine. It is hard to tell how the authors decide the genders of the animals in their stories. In Chinese culture and language, genders are always obscured. We use 他(ta1) to indicate he/she/him/her until the beginning of 20th century, a Chinese writer who studied abroad in France first time used word 她（ta1) in his drama. Even though in writing system, we have the distinction between masculine and feminine now, it is still confusing in speaking because they pronounce the same. However because many Chinese stories for children are translated from western languages, the genders of the animals should be influenced by GG in their original languages. That maybe where the stereotype of some animals’ genders from. Because there is no gender in Chinese grammar, there is no conflicts between grammatical gender systems. It’s easier for children to take the grammatical gender systems from other languages. Since I just started learning French, there is gender consistency between French GG and my previous perception. I think if there is a research in Chinese and GG language bilinguals’ sensitivity in genders, the bilinguals will be more sensitive than Chinese monolinguals.
November 14, 2011 at 10:42 am
William Mira
Unlike gestures commonly associated with speech, an emblematic gesture is not necessarily a physical representation of the content expressed by the words or of the rhythm of speech. In fact, emblematic gestures can be understood in the absence of any verbal cues as to their intended meaning. As a result emblematic gestures can bypass our linguistic system entirely to communicate concepts directly. This is different than McNeill’s conception of gesture which situates it as closely related to speech. McNeill suspects that the two as originate from the same cognitive structures however emblematic gestures often have no ties whatsoever to linguistic forms of expression.