Discovering Language Through Contrasts

This week’s readings on morphology and semantics made me reflect on the formalities and specifics of the language we speak.  Words seem so commonplace to me, and even though I have broken them down in language classes and English classes (and done word family exercises in like 1^st grade), I haven’t ever considered them this formally.

            The first Haspelmath reading discusses basics of morphology, including lexemes, word-forms, morphemes, allomorphs, and their analysis and relationships with each other.  The part of this chapter I found most fascinating was the descriptions of some “formal operations” that exist in languages other than English, like reduplication.  It’s interesting to imagine English words as if they operated in these patterns.  The second Haspelmath chapter devoted itself to different sorts of compounds. It was interesting to see that nouns and parts of nouns can be diagrammed in much the same ways syntax examples were diagrammed in the Carnie reading. It helped to already have a conceptual understanding of how the diagramming worked, and was also nice to see a unified methodology.

The Slobin reading made me conscious of the rhetorical differences inherently present in languages, especially those based on whether they are verb-framed languages or satellite-framed languages. As a language learner, it was always shocking to me when I was writing assignments with a word requirement how many more or less English words I would have to translate to meet the requirement.  Even now as a non-native speaker of French, I’ve noticed how a story will change slightly between me telling it in English and French. I more attributed that to French not being an L1 of mine, rather than French simply being different from English. Now I’m thinking both contribute to differences in my speech. 

            The Atkins-Levin reading was extraordinarily informative and effective in its use of “shake” verbs to explore semantics and lexicography.  If you had asked me even a week ago to name the five most boring jobs I could come up with, there was a fairly reasonable chance that lexicographer would have shown up on that list. I figured that dictionaries are pretty much already complete, and that their job must mostly consist of adding a few new words per year, or trying to sell their dictionary.  This paper showed how much work and exploration there remains to be done in linguistics and semantics and therefore lexicography for the language of English. The availability of a corpus helps show how our language behaves and how complicated an analysis of a set of “verbs” can be (as working through Table 4 and Table 5 showed me).  The corpus can also be used with a great multitude of cases like the “shake verbs”.  Because of Thursday’s lecture, I also found myself wondering about how if there is still this much work to do on studying English’s semantics, can field researchers really hope to fully capture endangered languages before they disappear? Would achieving that require creating a massive corpus that includes works of literature? What about the languages without a body of literature?