Amy Pi-Chan Hu
National Cheng-chi University,Taipei,Taiwan

A Case Study on Cognition and Second Language Acquisition: The Mountain Is Ours

Pronouns are semantically degenerate,and thus do not contain sufficient information to name the individual to which they are intended

to refer, therefore their uncertain nature commonly produces errors in interpretation. Our understanding of a pronoun is affected by three separate factors: the pronoun’s case,  number and gender; the syntactic structure within which the pronoun is placed; and the context in which it is used. Unfortunately, the language and the context do not always specify which antecedent is meant.Every specialized field develops its own technical jargon, therefore technical discourse is vital to avoid misunderstandings between different fields. In ROCv. Wang, decided in 2004by the Chia-yi District Court, the court quoted the record of the accused saying during his interrogation, “The mountain is ours, so the honey is ours,” (which was translated from Tsou,an aboriginal language in Taiwan,into Chinese) to signify the accused’s intention to rob the victim, and found the accused guilty as charged. Wang, an aboriginal chief of the Tsou tribe, has a limited knowledge of Chinese. This paper will focus on the interpretation of the pronouns “we” and “our(s)” in Tsou and Chinese, the nature of the language deficiency of the aboriginal people,and the availability of trained interpreters during trials.From a linguistic viewpoint,every word has its own mental space in the individual’s mind. This paper will reconstruct these two words, in order to determine what caused the different interpretations between the accused and the judges. Despite the emphasis on precision in law, it is undeniable that language remains vague in its own domain.Moreover, aboriginals frequently communicate in ways that are unfamiliar to people of non-aboriginal descent, which can lead to misunderstandings in a courtroom.