“Can you hear the difference?” That’s a question we’ll ask when we think someone perceives two things as one, say the same note played on two different pianos, one a digital keyboard and the other a concert grand. We might strike the same middle-C note on each instrument, but there’s a difference in the quality of the two, what musicians call timbre and students of language and thought call connotation. To perceive a difference between realities which at first glance seem to be the same is at the heart of thinking, at least the kind of thinking that’s behind what is called natural language, the sentences we write and speak every day to get our thoughts across to others in the common world we all share.
This ability to see that things might not be what they first appear to be, or, more importantly, might not mean what they first seem to mean, is one of the great benefits of studying language. We come to an awareness of the world and of ourselves, in fact, through the language we are naturally brought up in, but the surprising truth is that this natural language is really only a rough-and-ready tool, often too sharp but more often too dull to name real differences between things. When we’re not clear how to use language, we tend toward the ambiguous, going round and round in logical circles, not seeing our contradictions, and meaning one thing but saying another. And when we can’t find how one thing differs from another, we’ll call the two the same, losing the distinctions and risking the truth.
We can see this with the help of a grammatical illustration. In the sentences my sister was married at the time and my sister was married at St. Paul’s Church, the first two words of the predicate, was married, are identical. If we try to sense a difference between these two identical words, if we try, that is, to resist the temptation to conclude quickly that since the two words are the same they mean the same in every context, we will see that the predicate was married at the time is describing the subject: my sister was married at the time, in the same way that she was also happy or beautiful or even employed at the time. In this first use of the words was married, the verb was, in other words, is serving as a copula, a linking verb, to connect or associate the subject with the adjective married.
If we contrast this meaning of the words was married, however, with the way those same two words are used in the second example, we see that something very different is intended. To say that my sister was married at St. Paul’s Church is not so much to describe my sister as to name an action that occurred to her there. Perhaps we can perceive this more readily if we expand the predicate to include an agent of the action: my sister was married by the local bishop at St. Paul’s Church. In this predicate the same verb was no longer is a copula, but an auxiliary to the main verb married, helping it form the simple past tense in the passive voice. In the first sentence, married is an adjective in its own right; in the second, it is the verb.
Distinctions like these are important because, as we noted earlier, natural language, the way we put our sentences together for regular communication, can be refined only so much and still be acceptable for daily use—we speak in prose, after all, not poetry. But there’s a price to pay for that inevitable indistinction, and the better we can understand both the explicit and implicit meaning of our words, the more acute and precise will be our comprehension.
And speaking of poetry, which is the way we use natural language to do more than merely state and explain facts, perceiving the ambiguities of language is all important. In these three lines of a poem, for example, how would you construe the verb was, as copula or as auxiliary: with friends about her / there she was / healed. The question has no right answer, but knowing how grammar works can make us aware of what we understand those lines to mean, and what other ways of understanding them there might justifiably be.
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