What I Have Learned About English from Being in Japan (Or: Why Can’t Japanese Students of English Manage “A”, “An” and “The”?)

Abstract

In this concluding chapter, originally his farewell lecture to the faculty of Meisei University, Caldwell explains how his encounter with Japanese speakers of English provided supporting evidence for his theory of Molecular Sememics. Beginning with a discussion of the misuse of the determiners “a” and “the” by Japanese speakers of English, Caldwell finds that instead of systematic or syntactic rules being violated, it is a misunderstanding of the patterns of salience ordering in English. In contrast to Japanese, English uses determiners, pronouns, and several other devices, to marshal lesser or greater degrees of determinacy and focus to indicate the salience structure of a sentence. As seen in Chapter Four, these are the underlying structures of discourse which help order the speaker’s communicative intention, and satisfy the focus of the listener. Importantly, however, these structures are not rules, nor is language a categorical system; for Caldwell, unlike many in the Western tradition of linguistics and philosophy, is not interested in habitual and extreme generalizations, or strict categorization. Neither is he interested in unending particularization, such that everything is different beyond reconciliation. As such, Caldwell’s theory of Molecular Sememics is an account of language that sees it simply as a tool for communication, and seeks to understand the different strategies that help us do just that.