Blog 4

In the readings for this week, the Atkins and Levin selection focused on the specifics of internal and external causations of verbs and how this influences the transitivity or intransitivity of the verb. Hapelmath first defines many terms that can be used to describe the relationships between words: lexemes, word-forms, paradigms, word families, affixes, bases, roots, and many other terms. In the second part, Hapelmath delves into compound words, exploring their efficiency across languages. Slobin explains how typologies can be used to sort the many dimensions that characterize human languages and examine interacting patterns across languages.

In these readings, a couple things popped out to me. In the Atkins and Levins reading, at first, it seemed that shake, quake, and the other related words might be synonymous, but in the linguistic perspective, it is explained that they are rather near-synonyms that show real differences in syntactic behavior. As a toy example, the verbs buy and sell and explored. Both are different perspectives on the same event, so they express different meanings or senses of the event. I believe that different syntactical usage necessitates distinct meanings of words. If you can shake the saltshaker, but you cannot tremble it, then the two words must have different semantic meanings even if refer to the same type of motion on a lower-level description. I was also interested in how descriptions of location and motion differed between ASL and spoken English. The ASL descriptions were much more detailed, and I wonder if people to fluently sign ASL have better spatial perception because of their language usage.

I also thought it was interesting that some languages don’t use manner verbs in boundary cases (e.g. entering/exiting) and whether this means that mental conceptions of boundary case phenomena lose specificity. In real life, I have had this question about specificity of mental conceptions when talking to my grandmother who received her education in Taiwan before World War II. She does not always distinguish between blue and green, and I think this is an artifact of Japanese colonization of Taiwan. School was taught in Japanese, and a single word “ao” was taught to refer to blue and green. Only after WWII, did the Japanese education system teach the difference between blue and green. Overall, I am very interested in how language shapes perceptive abilities. I know that the top wine tasters have an elaborate vocabulary to describe different wine qualities, and I think it’s amazing how perceptive abilities are born from words.