Danya Kafai

Breaking Down Language

The Haspelmath reading brings out a new aspect of linguistics that had never crossed my mind. Words such living and lives cannot be themselves found in dictionaries and instead you have to look up the word live even if the meanings of the words differ. It surprised me that I had continuously overlooked this simple observation throughout my entire life. In his work, he analyzes the relationship between word-forms (words) and lexemes (sets of words). To do so he breaks down the words into smaller parts known as morphemes. Morphemes can have different kinds of meanings, some much more abstract than others. For example, wash, logic, and chameleon all have straightforward meanings, however, -al and –able are more indirect, and then some morphemes are extremely hard to provide meanings for such as –m ­­and –s. Haspelmath then delves into word structures including the differences between the suffix, prefix, root, base, and so on, until lastly he focuses his attention on morphological trees. The compounding of lexemes plays a key role in being able to break apart words and there are two main types, endocentric (the semantic head of the compound is inside the compound) and exocentric (the semantic head is out outside the compound).

The Atkins and Levins paper focuses on considering groups of near-synonyms together and analyzing how they are used and their syntagmatic relationship to better distinguish differences in their meanings. They use a systematic and detailed method of analyzing words such as shake, quake, shiver, and vibrate to try to better understand whether the semantic concept of internal and external causation can be the driving forces behind certain verbs’ behavior.

Slobin’s paper proved to be the most interesting for me. He took the frog-story and applied different linguistic structures, on-line processing, and cultural practices to see whether it causes any changes. Because I have been raised speaking multiple languages it was interesting to note the difference between V-languages and S-languages in the art of storytelling. V-languages being verb-phrased languages and S-languages being satellite-framed (greater specification of manner). They find there to be differences between the two. V-languages have more elaboration in “descriptions of locations of protagonists and objects and of end states of motion” whereas S-languages contain greater specification of manner. This idea shows that reading the same story in different languages will have an altering effect on the story itself. So stories such as Little Red Riding Hood or the Three Little Pigs could actually be expressed and portrayed differently for kids in different languages.