Chinese, Bathtubs, and Concrete

For this week there were three separate readings. In Slobin, the author detailed the typologies of words and sentences that help us characterize and sort human languages. Slobin mainly focuses on the typologies framed by Talmy with regards to the differences between verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages. In Atkins and Levin, the authors primarily focus on the concepts of internal and external causations, and how they relate to the differences between the word shake and its synonyms. In Haspelmath, the author first goes over the basic definitions of lexemes, word-forms, inflection, and morphemes among many others. Then in part two, Haspelmath illustrates the different types of compound words and how they can be more efficient or inefficient in other languages compared to English, all while tying them into morphological trees.

One part of Slobin that I found extremely intriguing was the creation of the third category, equipollently-framed langagues, in addition to verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages. Equipollently-framed languages do not fit into the two categories because it uses both manner and path in equal amounts. One example is Chinese where they say fei chu, or “fly exit,” instead of something like “come out.” Two full manner and path verbs are used here and the fact that this happens often in Chinese separates it from verb or satellite-framed languages. Another very interesting phenomenon related to this is that there is a learning curve associated with using manner and path verbs together. Younger people use path verbs more than path-manner combinations, so instead of saying “fly exit,” they might just simply say “exit.” However, by age nine, most native speakers are able to fluently incorporate path-manner combinations into everyday conversations. Non-native speakers of Chinese, like me, may take longer to be able to naturally adjust, as evidenced by my strict usage of simple path verbs on the rare occasion that I speak Chinese.

Another interesting point I found was in Haspelmath part 2 where the author describes the endocentric nature of English compound words. English compound words are endocentric because the head, or the semantically more important word, comes after the modifying and descriptive first word. For example, with the word “bathtub,” bath is the descriptive first word while tub is the important head of the word. This rule can be derived from the scientific method as described in the first chapter of Carnie, which is interesting because it never occurred to me that English compound words were solely endocentric. The most intriguing part that Haspelmath noted was that English compounds depend on the reader having enough common sense and context to make sense of the words. For instance, street-seller is obviously a person who sells goods on a street, but on some other planet, it could be taken literally as somebody who sells actual streets. This phenomenon has also never occurred to me mainly because most humans, including me, have the innate context and pragmatic sensibility to know that the street-seller is probably selling food or jewelry, not concrete and paint.