Posted under General
abcadeff said:
As for the other characters, for whom there IS no difference in appearance between the anime/manga and game
That has always fascinated me. Why do you native speaker people (I assume you're one) accent the wrong word? You mean to emphasise the fact the difference is not, yet you highlight "is", which is doing it completely backwards. I've seen it countless times, yet it still doesn't make the slightest amount of sense.
葉月 said:
That has always fascinated me. Why do you native speaker people (I assume you're one) accent the wrong word? You mean to emphasise the fact the difference is not, yet you highlight "is", which is doing it completely backwards. I've seen it countless times, yet it still doesn't make the slightest amount of sense.
"No difference" is more or less unconsciously taken as a unique syntagmatic unit in this case. That is to say, "no difference" is the object of the sentence instead of it being "difference" with a negative item attached. To put it into perspective, think of it in Yoda-speak: "No difference there is" instead of "difference there is not".
Since "no difference" is a unit, and the context is one in which that unit is already part of the shared knowledge (In layman terms, it's what's being discussed in the first place), the emphasis is instead placed in the fact that THERE IS "no difference".
Or so David Brazil would have you believe. His theory of intonation meaning has a few holes, but this has some sense to it at least.
Interesting. I guess what you say makes sense, thanks. However, I've seen the same done in "Who ARE you?", when in fact the speaker meant "WHO are you?" (ie. it wasn't the case that X said they're Y, which turned out to be false and now the speaker is asking for an identity that X actually is). Which wouldn't be directly explained by the unit breakup, unless there's a unit in there I'm missing.
Oh, and in case it's not obvious, this is exactly not how it works in my native language, which is why I'm trying to understand the English logic(*) behind doing it this way.
(*) That makes an arguably bold assumption that English does, in fact, have some kind of logic governing its rules(**), which is a contentious point.
(**) Ditto for it having rules.
This is a wild guess, but maybe it is something similar to German's V2 structure where the second element is the one that typically gets emphasis.
"Who ARE you?" sounds natural despite the the discrepancy you bring up "WHO are you?" sounds very unusual. "You are WHO?" sounds a bit better with the emphasis on the right word, but the syntax is a bit weird (the normal question transformation isn't applied).
The reason I say second element is because "Who THE HECK are you" or something like that also sounds right. Similarly "Where ARE you going?" sounds right, "WHERE are you going?" sounds very wrong. Maybe in context it could sound alright, but not at all in isolation.
Again this is just speculation. I'm much better at assessing syntax than pragmatics. Which language are you comparing to anyway?
Oh, English does in fact have rules. It has ALL KINDS of rules for all sorts of things, thanks to generations of native speakers who've borrowed words from every-fucking-where while rarely adapting them to their own syntax, so at least a good goddamn fraction of the lexicon obeys morphological inflection rules from whichever language it happened to originate. So you've got things like "Phenomenon" and "Phenomena" that still remain wholly unchanged and completely ignore standard inflection for singular/plural in English.
Don't even get me started on pronunciation. Seriously, at some point the people at the British court must have gotten really drunk and said "I know! Let's just not spell like half of our letters and have some vowels be written as totally different letters!". There's still a pattern to it, but I swear they were TRYING to make it as complicated as possible.
Rant over. As for your question: Uh... yeah that is weird. Logically, the emphasis should be in WHO, yet that sounds really unnatural no matter how I think about it. I've got a couple of ideas revolving around exploitation of the system, but the fact that there ISN'T a version that does not exploit it is... dunno, really.
Shinjidude said:
The reason I say second element is because "Who THE HECK are you" or something like that also sounds right.
That was my first guess too, exploitation of the prominence for added meaning (emphasis/emotion), but when you think about it, even the standard business-like question is still "Who ARE you?". So it doesn't quite hold as deviant if there wasn't a normal one to begin with. The question is innately emphasised like that for some reason I can't figure out.
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