1367260110.5528Understanding Syntax

14Understanding syntaxNow we can compare the word orders of the three languages. First, the word for ‘wrote’(a verb) has a different position in all three languages: at the end of the sentence inJapanese, at the beginning in Welsh, and somewhere in the middle in English – tobe precise, after the phrase the teacher. This tells us right away that not all languageshave the same sentence structure as English. Second, in both Japanese and English,the phrase ‘(the) teacher’ is initial in the sentence, so Japanese and English have animportant feature in common. In fact, at least 80 per cent of all languages would starttheir version of our sentence with the ‘teacher’ phrase. Welsh is different: its sentencesstart with the verb meaning ‘wrote’, a pattern found in perhaps 12 per cent of theworld’s languages. Third, both Welsh and English have the same order in the phrase‘to the student’, while the Japanese in (28) has the opposite word order: gakusei ni,literally, ‘student to’.Using the glosses we can work out quite a lot about the word order differences –and similarities – between the three languages. Other facts about Japanese and Welshemerge from the glosses too: for example, Japanese has no equivalent to ‘the’ and ‘a’,and Welsh has no word for ‘a’.You should now begin to see the importance of the gloss. On reaching a three‐lineexample in the text, you should start at the bottom and work upwards, reading thetranslation first, then examining the gloss, then looking at the source language. Keepin mind that the English may bear little resemblance to the original source. In (28)and (29), the examples are pretty similar to the English, word‐for‐word (even if theword orders are different), but this certainly isn’t always the case: (30) is from RapaNui, the Polynesian language of Easter Island.(30) E tagi ā te poki. (Rapa Nui)nonpast cry progressive the boy‘The boy is crying.’Apart from the word order differences (as in Welsh, the verb meaning ‘cry’ is (almost)at the beginning of the sentence), Rapa Nui has various other interesting features.In the English, is indicates that the crying is now, i.e. not in the past. The Rapa Nuiexample has no word for ‘is’, and instead a small word e indicates ‘nonpast’. Second,in English the ‐ing ending on cry indicates an ongoing action, i.e. the boy hasn’tfinished crying. Rapa Nui has a separate word to indicate this: the ‘progressive’word (meaning an unfinished action). Neither of these features of Rapa Nui can bediscovered from the English translation, of course. So you always need to read thegloss carefully, thinking about whatever point is being made in the surrounding text.It should be clear by now that if you read only the last line of an example, you won’tfind out about any language other than English!1.2.2.2 Lexical and grammatical informationGlosses contain both lexical information, printed in normal type, and grammaticalinformation, printed in small capitals. Lexical information means ordinary wordswhich are translations (or paraphrases) of the original language. In (28) and (29), the