Eccentrify - More linguistic oddities.

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July 9th, 2009

02:47 pm

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More linguistic oddities.
Though this one is somewhat meta. The exercise I'm doing at the moment is described as follows:
"Describe the objects you learned about in this lesson. Use both positive and negative characteristics to explain what they are like. Ex. There are five buildings. Two buildings are green. Three buildings are not green. They are black."

Now. What's interesting here is that in English, we overload the phrase "There are". It can mean either "five buildings exist", or "that location has five buildings". The meanings are almost identical (even "5 buildings exist" implies a location - obviously there are more than 5 buildings in the whole world), but there's a subtle difference.

In Russian, there are (see what I did there!?) two distinct words for the two meanings. "Есть" for the first one, "Вот" for the second.

So for the exercise, which meaning would you go for? I'll ask a Russian what they would say, but I suspect the answer is "It depends". So in English, would you say "There are 5 buildings" is a statement of existence, or location?

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From:	qamar
Date:	July 9th, 2009 07:19 am (UTC)

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Normally English grammar disambiguates by using 'there' twice, e.g. "There are 5 buildings there".

First 'there' = existence, second 'there' = location

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From:	qamar
Date:	July 9th, 2009 07:20 am (UTC)

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Of course, "there is no God" causes trouble in all sorts of ways (but empty sets are like that).

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From:	tyggerjai
Date:	July 9th, 2009 07:27 am (UTC)

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Yes - I suppose there is an implicit "here" (or, of you like, "there") in "There are 5 dogs". I have indeed decided to use "Есть" rather than "Вот". Still, interesting.

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From:	thorfinn
Date:	July 9th, 2009 08:01 am (UTC)

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Mathematicians are used to this one. :-) Avoid using "are" - it's the source of horrible ambiguity.

Within a joke, there exists at least one mathematician on a train travelling through Scotland, who upon observing a black sheep upon a hill, states that, "In Scotland, there exists at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."

As far as the actual original statement goes, I'd actually say that it's not ambiguous, really.

"There are five buildings" has an implicit context because of the present tense. "Now", therefore the context is "here".

Your ambiguity is more present in other tenses - because narrator locality is less fixed. e.g. "There were five buildings" is more problematic, and more likely to prompt "five buildings where?"

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From:	qamar
Date:	July 9th, 2009 08:14 am (UTC)

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*nods* context offers meaning for the demonstrative use of lots of words including 'there' and the indexicals 'I', 'now', 'here' etc...

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From:	tyggerjai
Date:	July 19th, 2009 01:40 am (UTC)

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Actually, my father would indeed say " ... at least one side of which was black at the time of observation" :P

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From:	sacred_chao
Date:	July 9th, 2009 07:53 am (UTC)

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It depends :)

It's usually a matter of emphasis, as far as I can tell. "THERE, are five buildings." is a statement of location. "There ARE five buildings." is an assertion as to the number of buildings as distinct from "There are FIVE buildings." which is explaining how many buildings there are. You also, of course have "There are five BUILDINGS." to explain what it is that there are five of. Because we have rid ourselves of most suffixes and prefixes and a couple of cases and rely hugely on syntax we do rather have to tweak the language with a couple of other tricks.

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From:	thorfinn
Date:	July 9th, 2009 08:03 am (UTC)

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And yes, I was going to say, "There, are five buildings" is getting more specific that you're talking location, but it's still a bit weird and unnecessary in present tense.

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From:	drbunsen
Date:	July 9th, 2009 11:53 am (UTC)

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I would say that context extends the meaning to clarify the amiguity. I had more intelligent stuff to add, but it appears to have dribbled out my left ear in the last few minutes.

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From:	_ryn
Date:	July 10th, 2009 08:23 pm (UTC)

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I'd take it as existence. I wouldn't necessarily expect their location to follow, but possibly just a description "that I really like" or "which we could use for this purpose" or whatever.

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Eccentrify!