Susie
  • Home
  • About
  • Give
  • Photos
  • Subscribe
  • Contact


Interesting Linguistics – June 29

June 29, 2019 by Susie

Here’s an easier one for you, since I’ve really worked your brains on the last few. Hey, you’re taking my graduate level linguistics classes along with me, so if you’ve been able to think through some of these things, you’re doing great!

But here are a few sentences that I’d like you to finish:

1. He killed it, cooked it, and ________.
2. He went home, brushed his teeth, put on his pajamas, and ________.
3. He died and ______.
4. They got married and ______.
5. At the picnic they had hot dogs and _______.

Though you may not complete them with the exact same words as someone else, if you’re a native English speaker in the US, there are probably only a few options that most all of you would put in those blanks. The ones that first come to my mind are the following:

1. ate it.
2. went to bed.
3. EITHER was buried OR went to heaven.
4. went on their honeymoon OR had a baby OR enjoyed a long and happy life.
5. hamburgers.

How many of you had the same answers as I did? These things are called Expectancy Chains. It means that they are things that we normally put together in this order and we’re so used to hearing the whole progression that we can almost finish the sentence before the person who’s talking to us finishes saying it. But if you break an expectancy chain, saying something that the person you’re talking to didn’t expect, it will usually cause your listener to do a double-take or at least use more processing power to actually catch what’s going on. Imagine, if instead of telling you that “Mrs. Smith died and was buried,” I told you that “Mrs. Smith died and then started talking.” It would be really weird. Or even if I just told you “Mrs. Smith died and blood came out of her nose,” it wouldn’t be quite as weird, but it still wouldn’t be what you were EXPECTING me to say. Right?

Each language has their own Expectancy Chains, and in order to sound “normal” and “easy to listen to,” someone who’s learning the language has to learn what is expected in that language. For example, in My Language, I can’t say, “Please give me that pot over there.” Instead, I’d have to say, “Take that pot over there and give it to me.” In English, we don’t have the Expectancy Chain of “take it and give it to me,” but they do. In order for my speech to sound natural, I need to learn how to say what they expect to hear.

Here’s another example for you. How would you fill in the following sentence:

He went to town and __________.

If you’re like me, you probably wouldn’t know what was expected next. But in Kasem, another language spoken in West Africa, people could fill that in just as easily as you could fill in “hot dogs and hamburgers.” They’d say, “He went to town and arrived.”

Beyond just speech, this is important in Bible translation as well. If we were translating a verse into Kasem, for example, that said that Jesus went to Capernaum, if we didn’t add “and arrived,” they’d be waiting for your to finish your sentence and wonder if He ever made it or not, missing the rest of the story as they try to imagine where He still is on His journey.

Can you think of any other possible Expectancy Chains in English or other languages you know?

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Ethnos360

More Posts:

« Interesting Linguistics – June 24
Ah, now I understand . . . »

Comments

  1. John Anderson says

    July 14, 2019 at 6:58 pm

    I have no idea if this is what you are teaching on but I do remember my parents talking about people that they would meet who ESL learners. They would say things like, “Throw Mama down the stairs a kiss. And then there is the line by Tom Hanks in The Terminal where he is getting to as a girl he has meet if she wants to have “an eat to bite”

  2. David Smith says

    July 1, 2019 at 10:04 am

    I love it! In one of my Syntax classes, we also talked about how pairings like “peas and carrots” and “salt and pepper” are arranged to create a sense of rhythm. These two groups have a trochaic (ABAB) stress pattern, if I may borrow a term from poetry, where A is a stressed syllable and B, an unstressed syllable. If the items were reversed (e.g. “pepper and salt”), the stress would be ABBA which would sound more random and less ordered. Does these mean we are naturally inclined toward poetry? (:

  3. Shirley says

    June 30, 2019 at 6:47 pm

    It is an expectancy chain- He went to town and got ice cream.

Archives

  • June 2022
  • May 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • October 2021
  • September 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • June 2021
  • April 2021
  • January 2021
  • November 2020
  • September 2020
  • July 2020
  • May 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2020
  • February 2020
  • January 2020
  • November 2019
  • October 2019
  • September 2019
  • June 2019
  • May 2019
  • April 2019
  • February 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • January 2017
  • December 2016
  • November 2016
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • August 2016
  • July 2016
  • June 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • March 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • October 2015
  • September 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011
  • July 2011
  • May 2011
  • January 2011
  • August 2010
  • About
  • Blog
  • Home
  • Give
  • Photos
  • Subscribe
  • Contact

Disclaimer: This personal ministry website is provided by Ethnos360 as a courtesy to its members. Ethnos360 makes no warranty regarding the accuracy of the information on these pages. Opinions expressed are provided by members in good faith, but are entirely those of the member and do not necessarily represent policy, doctrinal position, or opinions of Ethnos360. If you encounter information that you consider questionable, please e-mail the Ethnos360 web team.

Susie

© Copyright 2022 Ethnos360. All rights reserved.

Log In

  • 