LINGUIST List 11.2294

Mon Oct 23 2000

Qs: Phantom Phrases, "To mean"/Arguments

Editor for this issue: Karen Milligan <karenlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. karchung, Phantom phrases
2. Jorge Guitart, query about arguments--to mean

	This past week a student who had done a transcription of Cat
Steven's "Father and Son" as part of a class assignment said she
and a friend heard a Mandarin phrase in one part of the song. The
song describes a conflict between a middle-aged father and his
college-age son in which the son says he's cried 'keeping all the
things I knew inside', and over his father's unwillingness to
listen to him. 

	The phrase the student 'heard' was _ba3 lei4 ca1 diao4_ (take
tears wipe away) 'wipe away your tears'; her friend said she
heard _ba3 lei4 ca1 gan1_ (take tears wipe dry) 'dry your tears',
both of which make sense in the context of the lyrics. I then
played the portion of the song in question for the whole
(Mandarin-speaking) class - and they burst out in raucous
laughter. They immediately 'heard' it too. I didn't (I am a
fluent but not native speaker of Mandarin) - until I tried again
at home and figured out what was going on.

	The English phrase was: [It's hard,] but it's harder [to ignore
it]; the part that sounded like Mandarin is unbracketed; the
parts in brackets are added for context. The English-Mandarin
correspondence is:

	bV (tap)I ts'a d (_but it's harder_, British English)

	(V = wedge [inverted V], I = short lax i, ' indicates
aspiration,  = schwa)

	ba3 lei4 ca1 diao4

	I played it for my son (Mandarin-English bilingual, age 19) to
see if he could 'hear' it, without telling him the Mandarin. He
didn't; but then he got it after I told him the Chinese phrase.
'I hear it, but it's a bit forced,' was his comment.

	This made me remember similar experiences I've had with various
languages; one that comes to mind is a character in a beginning
Chinese dialogue named Zhang1 Han4sheng1. To me he was always
'John Hanson'! Though I was laughed at once by a classmate for
calling him this.

	I guess this falls under the category of 'shoecabbages', on
which Teresa Dowlatshahi (shoecabbagehotmail.com) posted over
LINGUIST some time ago. (I've heard from her recently, and she is
currently writing a weekly children's column on 'shoecabbages'.)
The words Teresa collects seem to have a fairly clear and stable
one-to-one correspondence in the mind of the speaker. What I'm
describing seems to be more on-the-fly and context-dependent, and
with less of a fixed connection between the matched-up elements.

	Does anybody else have experiences like this to report,
anecdotal or otherwise? I don't plan to do a serious study on
this, but I find the phenomenon intriguing. Please write to me
privately and I'll summarize if there are enough responses.


						Karen Steffen Chung
						National Taiwan University
						karchungccms.ntu.edu.tw

How many arguments does the English verb 'to mean' have as used in (1) and
(2)

(1) You mean nothing to me
(2) You mean a great deal to me

Are [nothing] and [a great deal] arguments? You can't say *'You mean to
me'

In "Do you want to know something? You mean a great deal" is the second
sentence ungrammatical if your interlocutor has no idea of your feelings
towards her or him?

Thanks.

Jorge Guitart
SUNY Buffalo