Teacher Discussion Forums

I recently taught a class in which I wrote on the board:
I think so - I believe it will happen
I don't think so - I believe it won't happen

One of my adult students immediately insisted I should have written
I don't believe it will happen.

I don't doubt her version was correct but believe my explanation to have been both simple and correct too.

It seems I am often fighting friendly battles over so called grammar rules with my adult students, is this a battle I should accept defeat in?
Thanks.

To avoid these kind of problems, I think you have got to make it absolutely clear to your (oriental?) students that your "meaning paraphrases" are exactly that, just paraphrases, and not to be taken as equally useful or as frequent as the more idiomatic sentences on the left (I think so vs. I don't think so).

Actually, is there a need for your paraphrases at all? If you can convey the meaning without them, then do so (e.g. contextualization, mime etc); if you speak their L1 (in a monolingual L1 class), I suppose you could do a quick "translation check". That is, to me, there is definitely a risk that things will get confused if you use English all the time, to further explain the English!

I guess that ultimately, this female student of yours has had it drilled into her that English people usually say "I don't think it will rain" rather than "I think it won't rain".

Your student is quite right and her version sounds better as well.

I don't think he'll marry her
is subtly different from
I tnink he won't marry her.

Thanks for your responses.
I will avoid the unnecessary paraphrase in future.
As I said, I do not doubt her version to be correct and in fact agree that it sounds better than my original. My real question is: Was my version actually incorrect?( I accept its clumsiness etc.)
Could you expand on the subtle difference that you talked about Stephen.
Thanks again

A nice example of the result of the mantra "Use only English in the classroom!" - explanations more difficult than the original example.

Your sentence is grammatically correct though Ilunga, one situation where it might be used is to contrast with "I believe it will happen".

Hang on, that's just how you used it. How clever of you!

The possibility of negating think or will happen is surely not one that's confined to English. I admit I'm not familiar with Korean, but would be very surprised if I don't think it will happen and I think it won't happen were said in the same way.

Well, I don't know about Korean, but I recall my Chinese teacher saying that Chinese people only think, they don't "not think" (to them that would be non-sensical...which is why the "don't think" structure can be "interesting" to them).

In other words, "(Wo xiang) mingtian (bu) xiayu" - (I think) tomorrow (not) rain: "xiayu", "down rain", is what is or is not negated in Chinese (apparently! ).

Woodcutter should be able to shed more light on not only the Chinese, but also the Korean aspects of this (just as Ilunga also presumably can regarding the Korean).

Thanks for that, fluffyhamster. Would that still hold true for think meaning believe/hold an opinion rather than reflect/consider ? Arter all, what we're really talking about here is I am not of the opinion it will rain.

Been boning up on your Chinese, have we, lol?

To be honest, I have been thinking about English so much over the past few years that I'm not now that sure what "xiang" means (at least, not what it might mean exactly within any structuralist system of meaning oppositions we could identify within Chinese itself!).

All I can say is that, in the context/sentence my teacher was illustrating, he used "xiang" (and to me, the interesting thing is not so much whether that verb accurately reflected his contention, but whether he would've used the pronoun and verb if he hadn't been speaking to English-speaking students of Chinese and having to make up examples for their benefit).

Even if he had to use "Wo xiang..." to make it clear it wasn't a fact/report of a forecast but rather his opinion, I guess it would still only have the literal translation of "I believe and/or am of the opinion that tomorrow it will not rain").

Woodcutter!

Ok, Woodcutter will bring his astonishingly accomplished orientalism to bear on the matter, after a brief check on the situation!

However, he does not see the necessity of attending to somewhat fine nuance in a rough paraphrase. Ilunga's sentence was produced as anyone might produce it in that circumstance, and the know-all student sounds annoying.

It is always a little irritating when a student with a good but basic grasp of the language insists that their grammatical knowledge outweighs the instinctive english of a native speaker. Have many of you come across this problem?

I appreciate that you're making a general statement there, Ilunga, and I would concur with the sentiments you and Woodcutter have expressed. But we shouldn't ever fall into the trap that just because we say it smoothly and effortlessly, and it all ends up making perfect sense to us, that the same will be so for our students.

Grammar is the great leveller, and I think it can help us identify the core proposition that is needing to be expressed amid, and "averaged out" between perhaps competing idiolects and varieties of English.

(Obviously, it helps immensely if the "average" model given to students in the first place is close to what they will actually need, because this will help minimize potential conflicts between model and reality. Unfortunately, in the past, and even nowadays, accurate AND fluent models are not always made available to students, especially not models that take account of LEARNER varieties and that try to underline the similarities between them and native varieties; there is a tendancy now to dump native-speaker data into classrooms as if it were "just what the students needed"!).

I guess I might sound a bit confused here, but if so, that's only because this is a complex issue (in fact, it is perhaps the central issue in TEFL, now more than ever).

Soapbox away, and back into my hamstercage I go now (for a while).

OK then, here goes with the Asian languages.

Korean is a SOV language, similar to Japanese though not considered of the same language family (for political reasons ). To translate "I don't think it will happen" we would usually put the verb "think" "saenggak (hada)" at the end of the sentence. The suffix structure "ji an" usually negates.

Na nun (I) ku (that) koshi (thing) ironal koshira (will happen) saenggak haji anunda.

Transliteration is (more or less!) in the old McCune-Reischauer style minus diacritics.

We can also translate "I think it won't happen" into

Ku (that) koshi (thing) ironaji anul (won't happen) kora saenggakhamnida.

As far as I can tell these things are semantically very similar, just as in English, and the former is also the more natural of the two.

As to Chinese, why ask me? Can't Xui make himself useful for once? I'll do my best though. "Think" is always a little tricky to translate directly, so I can't do much with the distinction Lolwhites is asking for.

Hamster's "xiang" is a word which hovers between "think" and "want". We can say "Wo (I) xiang qu (Go)" "I want to go" and "Wo bu (not) xiang qu" "I don't want to go". However though we can say "Wo xiang mingtian (tomorrow) bu hui (could) xiayu (rain)" "I think it won't rain tomorrow" we can't say "Wo bu xiang mingtian hui xiayu". As soon as we negate xiang it seems to say "don't want".

I usually prefer, in my crude interlanguage, to go for "juede" which hovers between "think" and "feel".
This can be negated in both ways "Wo juede mingtian bu hui xiayu" and "Wo bu juede mingtian hui xiayu" but the latter is less natural, in contrast with English.

We may also use "kan" "see" to mean "think" and say "Wo kan mingtian bu hui xiayu" but we cannot negate that first verb in this way.

The verb "believe", however, which was Ilunga's original, may be negated. We can say "Wo xiangxin (believe) ta bu hui lai (come)" "I believe he won't come" and "Wo bu xiangxin ta hui lai" "I don't believe he will come". I have the suspicion that with this verb the negation of "believe" is a more natural sounding construction.

Again, I see no salient semantic differences between these choices.

Hmm that take on the Chinese seems pretty sound to me. Well done woody! I suspect you have done a better (clearer!) job than Xui ever could. Maybe Larry will throw in his two cents' worth when he gets back (not that I think he would need to).

In Lakoff and Johnson's updated edition (basically, with a new afterword by the authors) of Metaphors We Live By, they say the following (page 129):
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is a rule in English, sometimes called negative transportation, which has the effect of placing the negative further away from the predicate it logically negates; for example,

Mary doesn't think he'll leave until tomorrow.

Here n't logically negates leave rather than think. This sentence has roughly the same meaning as

Mary thinks he won't leave until tomorrow.

except that in the first sentence, where the negative is FURTHER AWAY from leave, it has a WEAKER negative force. In the second sentence, where the negative is CLOSER, the force of negation is STRONGER.
===============================================
So, their second example sentence there is stronger, to which we might add, CLEARER (easier to process than the first sentence, right?).

Why then does English negate the first predicate? Perhaps all we can really say is that "English kills two birds with one stone, in the order they appear"!