The last post was about differences in pictorial structures in productions where the teams came from two different language groups – the Indo-European (Swedish/Norwegian) and the Ural-Altaic (Finnish). English belongs to the Indo-European group while Estonian and Hungarian belong to the Ural- Altaic group.
According to the Strømnes information theory, linguistic communication means conveying information about states that are in line with the speaker’s mental model. By definition, states are spatial relationships between two or more objects. According to the theory, information is primarily spatial and different languages deal with spatial relationships in their mental models in different ways. The Finnish and Swedish mental models unveiled in the laboratory proved to be very different. These languages differ considerably in their ways of communicating information about spatial relationships.
The Finnish language emphasizes relationships and the Swedish language movement in a three-dimensional space. Strømnes’ information theory and its mental models have been supported by learning experiments (Strømnes, 1974), visual communication studies (Strømnes et al., 1982) and language teaching ( Strømnes and Iivonen, 1985).
Since the mental models of the Finnish and Swedish languages differ significantly, it is conceivable that the mental models of other languages belonging to the same language groups would be fundamentally similar and would differ from each other in the same way as the mental model of the Finnish language differs from the Swedish language model. The next two posts will deal with that question, but before that I will take a quick look at the grammars of the related languages.
Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian
All three languages belong to the Finno-Ugric language group and they are inflectional languages. There are fourteen to eighteen cases in the languages in question (Table 1). The least number of cases is in Estonian. In practice, the Finnish and Estonian languages have the same number of cases because there is very little use for the instructive case in Finnish. However, all of the other cases are not the same. The Finnish language has an accusative that is missing in the Estonian language. In Estonian there is again a terminative that is not found in the Finnish language.
Differences in the use of cases are in practice quite small. In some cases, the external local cases are used in Estonian language (adessive, ablative and allative), when internal local cases are used in Finnish language (inessive, elative and illative). Time is expressed in Estonian using adessive when essive is used in Finnish. Language used as a tool for speech or writing is expressed in inessive in Estonian, while in Finnish translative or adessive is used. The Estonian comitative corresponds to the Finnish instructive or (more generally) adessive (Vääri, 1975).
The Hungarian language has the most cases, eighteen. In Finnish and Hungarian, the local case system includes 3 x 3 cases. Three internal and three external local cases are almost comparable, but the third series is different; in Finnish the essive, translative and partitive are only historically local cases. In Hungarian, the third triad refers to a nearby location (Gerevich-Kopteff & Csepregi, 1989).
These three languages are thus grammatically very close to each other. Thus, it may be assumed that the mental models of languages would be very similar in the sense of Strømnes. On this basis, it can be expected that the image structures of film production in these countries are quite similar.
Table 1. The cases of Finnish, Estonian, and Hungarian
FINNISH ESTONIAN HUNGARIAN
| Nominative | Nominative | Nominative |
| Genitive | Genitive | Genitive |
| Accusative | Partitive | Accusative |
| Partitive | Inessive | Inessive |
| Inessive | Elative | Elative |
| Elative | Illative | Illative |
| Illative | Adessive | Superessive |
| Adessive | Ablative | Delative |
| Ablative | Allative | Sublative |
| Allative | Abessive | Adessive |
| Abessive | Comitative | Ablative |
| Comitative | Essive | Allative |
| Essive | Translative | Dative |
| Translative | Terminative | Instrumental-comitative |
| Causative | ||
| Terminative | ||
| Translative | ||
| Temporal |
English
The English language belongs to the Indo-European language group, which includes the languages of the countries (Sweden and Norway) involved in the previous study (Strømnes et al., 1982). In the English language only the plural and genitive endings are left of the bending forms. Other meanings are created using prepositions. The preposition system is largely similar to that of the Swedish and Norwegian counterparts suggesting that they form a similar system with the prepositions of the Swedish / Norwegian languages. Thus, the structures of image production should also be largely similar. Creating an exhaustive list of English prepositions would be a great job because 80-100 prepositions are used to express spatial relationships (Jackendoff & Landau, 1991).
The hypotheses about the pictorial structures in materials filmed in Hungary and England will be examined in the next three posts.
REFERENCES
Gerevich, É. & Csepregi, M. (1989) Unkaria suomalaisille (Hungarian for Finns). Helsinki: Oy Finn Lectura Ab.
Jackendoff, R. & Landau, B. (1991) Spatial language and spatial cognition. In D. Napoli & J. A. Kegl (eds), Bridges between psychology and linguistics: A Swarthmore festschrift for Lila Gleitman. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
Strømnes, F.J., Johansson, A. & Hiltunen, E. (1982) The externalised image. A study showing differences correlating with language structure between pictorial structure in Ural-Altaic and Indo-European filmed versions of the same plays. Helsinki: The Finnish Broadcasting Corporation, Report No. 21
Strømnes, F.J. (1974) No universality of cognitive structures? Two experiments with almost perfect one-trial learning of translatable operators in a Ural-Altaic and an Indo-European language. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 15, 300-309.
Strømnes, F.J. and livonen, L. (1985) The teaching of the syntax of written language to deaf children knowing no syntax. Human Learning, 4, 251-265.
Vääri, E. (1975) Viron kielen oppikirja (Textbook of the Estonian language). Helsinki: Suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura.