Re: interrogative tail or head ?

CG> 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.
CG> Of course. But language is a bunch of contradictory elements: recognisability
CG> and speed of speech, precision and shortness of statements, intended meaning
CG> and received meaning. Each language tries to get around those unreconciliable
CG> elements in the optimal way (in short, it's probably impossible to do better
CG> than what has already been done. If you do, your language ceases to be human
CG> and people will have a hard time learning it).
"human" is referred to and defined through the status quo and the languages which are
already spoken. each other attempt to change+improve language (auxlanging) is
crucified to be called "unnatural" or "not human".
but i think thats not a very consistent argument.
the first written bible published and produced by gutenberg was cursed
by the catholic church to be satanic and unessecary because most
people couldnt read or write. that people became literate *through* the
development of bookprints could only teach the time.
new standards have no right to become adopted, but they can when they
are usefull enough.
and "usefull" is the magic keyword.


when you use the word "human" than i prefer to use the word "common".
inventions are always uncommon before they become adopted.
substitution of "uncommon" with the term "unhuman" sounds in
this sentence weird for me.

>> when people tend to miss the "head", but still place important words
>> at the head, then the miss is abviously not relevant.
>>
CG> Well, I can check every day that when the important part of my sentences (the
CG> most meaningful part) is at the beginning of the sentence, I get more questions
CG> like: "what did you say?" or "can you repeat?" than when the important part is
CG> at the end.
scientific texts tend to be written this way.
when you mark the important or "core" parts of your text strong
enough, people will recognize it better, its a matter of layout ,
structure, repetition, colors, and some other technics.
when your text is longer than a few kb , a short abstract is a good
choice to mark your core.
the trick is to separate the explanations and substantiation from the
abstract/conclusion which people care to memorize.
CG> But the other problem is that the beginning of a sentence is
CG> stronger than the end (because we generally breathed before beginning the
CG> sentence), so that at the end things can get a little mangled. To speak in a
CG> signal-processing way, as for emission, the beginning of a sentence is less
CG> noisy than the end, but reception is more sensitive to the end than to the
CG> beginning.
CG>  Each language has its own ways to reconcile those two incompatible
CG> elements. Usually, the strength of emission at the beginning of a sentence is
CG> enough to override the lack of sensitivity of the reception, so that fronting
CG> stays an important feature of languages. But it's not always true. If it was,
CG> French would never have got such long expressions to begin questions with,
CG> which seem to waste the strong beginning of sentences without conveying
CG> anything meaningful.

rick morneau wrote in his essay "syntax for artificial languages" in his syntax comparision:
"VSO .. is also easier for human brains and computers to parse (than SVO)" and
"SVO .. probably accounts for slightly more than 40% of all languages."    and
"VSO .. probably accounts for about 15% of all languages."

this leads to my consideration, that whats common doenst have to be optimal.

CG> Also, as for the psychological problem, I will contradict you on this one. For
CG> me, and for most people I know, questions with the rising intonation seem more
CG> comfortable for the hearer than questions without. Questions without the rising
CG> intonation sound nearly like orders, which is psychologically more offensive
CG> than a simple request shown by a rising intonation.
i think its a matter of taste and degree of intonation until it gets annoying.
however  there is no doubt that interrogation markers placed at the tail of a sentence
take by surprise and the listener cant prepare an answer easily or adjust himself for the intention
of the speaker.
its the same with the in this list so-called "garden path sentences".
both are low predictable.

regards,
c.s.
CG> Christophe.

CG> http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr