Michael Jackson isn't dead. - How we make a sentence

        "Not everything that is more difficult is more meritorious"
                                                                                         Thomas Aquinas








       Michael Jackson's mortal remains are reportedly buried in an unmarked grave at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Hollywood. Probably. Because there were other reports that he had been cremated.
       Perhaps surprisingly and certainly disappointingly, there were no reports that he had worked his way out of his tomb to perform formation dancing along with other residents of the cemetery.
       Otherwise, and somewhat inevitably, there are people who insist that Mr Jackson isn't dead at all.

       In fact, I do not wish to argue over the final resting place of one famous person's bones, nor do I intend to offer evidence to prove that the singing star faked his own death and now lives out his days happily under an alias. What I would actually like to do is to exhume the skeletal remains of  S. Entence Esq. and reexamine those remains.
       From that reexamination I will offer a different take on what constitutes the basic skeleton of a sentence, and attempt to explain how the way sentences are formed allows human beings a level of communication that our fellow animals don't possess and that, because of this special ability, we can both conjure Michael Jackson back from the grave even while he remains firmly in it.
       Also, with the Zombie King of Pop being both alive and dead at the same time, it is only fair to refer to this situation as Schrodinger's Michael Jackson.*

       The bare bones of a sentence have long been considered to rest in the form of  those things  known as subject and predicate; which is certainly one way to look at it. Another way to look at sentences is expressed in by the idea that a sentence contains: "a complete thought" as explained on the Common Knowledge** website here.
      But there are other ways to look at the innards of this particular linguistic body, and the one I'm attempting to explain concerns the question: "How do children know how to make sentences when there is no explicit training?" 
        What I would like to suggest here, is that no native speaker forms a sentence through basic consideration of the subject and predicate. What people actually do is start with information and then move to idea. This is the most basic step of making a sentence and is the most basic step of all communication. This is the most basic way our brains work.
         For example, let's say a speaker starts with the information of Michael Jackson. Presuming that we don't need to pause to ask or check who Michael Jackson is, our brains will move to connected ideas. In this context the ideas could include: a singer, a dancer, Peter Pan, children, nut-case etc.
        In this example we are going to use,  the basic idea is: dead.
         So now, there is the information of: Michael Jackson.

         And then we can move onto the idea, and the idea in this case is: dead.

                              Information    ---------------------------->   Idea

                            Michael Jackson --------------------------> Dead

       Now, what a sentence basically allows us to do is describe or explain the relationship or connection between the Information and the  Idea. This is what all sentences are basically doing.

      The most basic connections of information and idea are like this:

                                 Information    ---------------------------->   Idea

                                (something)                   is                          (something)
                        
                                        "                           isn' t                        "

                                        "                           has                           "

                                        "                        doesn't have                 "

                                        "                         is like                         "

                                        "                        is, for example            "

                                        "                            is                            (somewhere)

                                        "                            isn't                         (somewhere)

                                        "                            is                             (sometime)



      The important point is that sentences express the relationship between the information and the idea. Naturally then, the process of making a sentence is as follows:

                                    1. Information
                                    2. Idea
                                    3. Describing and explaining of the relationship between 1. and 2.


        For example:

                          1.                             3.                                 2.

                        this                           is                                good

                        this                           isn't                            food

                        this                           has                             noise

                       this                             is                               a person.

                       this                            isn't                            a person.



            Now, this way of explaining how people most basically construct a sentence is very far from being standard in Tesol or education in general. We might ask why that would be, and the very simple and obvious reason is that: people don't know how they do it. Which obviously makes it difficult to teach. After all, in standard teaching practice throughout history, the teacher explains how something is done, and then the student attempts to do it by themselves. So if you don't know how you do it yourself, then you can only show how you do it in a superficial way and thus an important basic step is missing.
             Another reason why teaching how people make a sentence is not standard is because there is no recognition of its necessity. Making a sentence is such a basic human skill, possessed by all, that there has long been the quite normal tacit idea that it is no more necessary to teach people how to make a sentence than it is to teach people how to walk.
              But what if you suddenly found yourself transformed into a centaur, and had to cope with horses legs, something you had never done before? Would it not be helpful to understand the most basic way that horses legs operate? And isn't this a reasonable analogy of one of the most basic difficulties of second language learning?
            If you don't agree, I checked with this guy who had been afflicted by a witch's curse. He said my analogy stands up. (Unlike him when it first happened.)

At The Renaissance Fair. Clearly, there were more centaurs during the Renaissance than you might think.

    When the announcement of Michael Jackson's demise first occurred, my own ideas were sent tumbling over one another in the context of trying to process the information that the world's strangest most famous person was gone. It was as though the headline had flashed up: The Loch Ness Monster is Dead. We were being told that a mythical creature had left the material world. Little wonder that some of those who had heavily invested in the idea of Jackson's life being lived in lock-step with their own would refuse to believe it:




               Info    ----------------------------------->      Idea

        Michael Jackson              isn't                         dead

            Denying reality is something that human beings are very good at. Our power to thumb our nose at the unwavering opinions of the universe stems largely from our ability with language. Specifically, our ability to create sentences that can shoulder the weight of massive lies.
         As sentences provide the basic skeletons for all the chimerical wonders we produce, it is interesting that so little thought is given to considering how they most basically work. Also, the idea that people (especially those who consider themselves "educated") get from the information that the most basic way that sentences are formed is a subject largely ignored is often: How dare you suggest this? A reaction so emotional because the idea that we don't actually have a very good idea about how we speak is tied to notions of self-identity and pride.
         In this day and age, the modern flint-axe of Google might be employed to cut open the belly of the internet to see what the entrails have to say on this emotive subject.
        Asking: "How do sentences work?" gets a relatively paltry 144 results, and most of these are concerned with more specific situations such as: "How do sentences work with each other" or "How do sentences work in paragraphs?" 　Even an academic paper about teaching basic writing to native speakers of non-standard English  offers what might be termed 2nd stage understanding by using the terms topic and comment where Michael Jackson would be the topic and isn't dead the comment. This is appropriate for the goals of this academic paper, but what I would like to offer is a model for how everybody, everywhere makes sentences; from small children to the most powerful people in society, we all, in whatever language, organise information in basically the same way.
   
         When trying to understand anything, It is always useful to have an overview.

     

　　Drawing back from observing anything can add a wealth of information that might otherwise go unnoticed, and that information will inevitably give rise to new and useful ideas.
      For example, taking a very long step back, it is possible to observe the surprising fact that dinosaurs lived on the other side of the galaxy!

Dinosaurs from space!

     So, if we accept that sentences are formed according to Info ----> Idea,
then any statement is basically the describing and explaining of the connection between the information and the idea, and and any question is basically seeking to understand the connection between information  and idea.
     Consequently, it would make sense, when teaching languages, to point out to people how it most basically works. That is to say, the start of language learning should be about connecting information with ideas. And then sentences. 
     That follows the model of how we learnt our own languages, yet it is not followed for the simple reason that we don't know this is the model.     Accordingly, TESOL dives straight into sentences without bothering to outline the most basic aspects of how sentences work.
     It is as though you were to teach Maths by starting with quadratic equations and leaping past simple addition.
     The fact that people still manage to learn languages is a testament to our greatest instinct and greatest instinctive skill: communication.
     And if that's true, why is there so much resistance to understanding communication beyond its ability to manipulate others; beyond its usefulness as a stick and a carrot?
     Could it be because cultural norms, those ideas that form culture, are made and encouraged by those who hold both stick and carrot?
      For, if we are to understand how communication works, then we can see what's up their sleeves.
      The same thing that's up ours.
    


     History has consistently produced, and been built on, new ideas. History used to have divine right and slavery and dinosaurs as the norm.
     Information changed and so did ideas and so did the dinosaurs.
     Michael Jackson is dead. So are the dinosaurs.

     Thanks to our ability to construct sentences, we construct information, which in turn, makes ideas.
    Michael Jackson isn't dead. And the dinosaurs lived on the other side of the galaxy.
    







* Although you probably shouldn't.
** A product of the interestingly opaque think-tank: Civitas