Re: interrogative tail or head ?

En réponse à claudio <claudio.soboll@...>:

>
> you state: the head of a sentence is the most important part and i
> agree. thats the principle: importance comes first.
> but i cant agree to the argument about the unwitting miss of the first
> words of a sentence.
> why ?
> it contradicts your first statement.
Of course. But language is a bunch of contradictory elements: recognisability
and speed of speech, precision and shortness of statements, intended meaning
and received meaning. Each language tries to get around those unreconciliable
elements in the optimal way (in short, it's probably impossible to do better
than what has already been done. If you do, your language ceases to be human
and people will have a hard time learning it).

> when people tend to miss the "head", but still place important words
> at the head, then the miss is abviously not relevant.
>
Well, I can check every day that when the important part of my sentences (the
most meaningful part) is at the beginning of the sentence, I get more questions
like: "what did you say?" or "can you repeat?" than when the important part is
at the end. But the other problem is that the beginning of a sentence is
stronger than the end (because we generally breathed before beginning the
sentence), so that at the end things can get a little mangled. To speak in a
signal-processing way, as for emission, the beginning of a sentence is less
noisy than the end, but reception is more sensitive to the end than to the
beginning. Each language has its own ways to reconcile those two incompatible
elements. Usually, the strength of emission at the beginning of a sentence is
enough to override the lack of sensitivity of the reception, so that fronting
stays an important feature of languages. But it's not always true. If it was,
French would never have got such long expressions to begin questions with,
which seem to waste the strong beginning of sentences without conveying
anything meaningful.

Also, as for the psychological problem, I will contradict you on this one. For
me, and for most people I know, questions with the rising intonation seem more
comfortable for the hearer than questions without. Questions without the rising
intonation sound nearly like orders, which is psychologically more offensive
than a simple request shown by a rising intonation.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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