Exiting stuff!

In this week’s readings, what really struck me was the concept of morphemes. When I use words in everyday speech, I don’t think twice about what I’m saying in the sense of the actual words I am using: simply about the meaning of what I am saying. However, Haspelmath’s reading helped me think closely about how separate “chunks” of a word factor into an eventual overall meaning in the whole word (for example with “undo-able” and “un-doable”). This concept is now rather distracting as I have been paying a lot more attention to my everyday word choice since. This concept also reminded me of previous lectures where we looked at how phonemes are a sub-section of sound – helping me realize the intricacies art of linguistics; we are dealing with the smallest of details in words and sounds.  And as Kenstowicz pointed out in a previous reading to do with speech, thank God for context, as it helps us in so many realms of speech and language; when identifying the correct meaning of a synonym, identifying the meaning of an unknown word based on the rest of the sentence its used in, or adjusting for different pronunciation of a word by a non-native speaker.

Slobin’s article was particularly interesting as I am interested in how context shapes language and perception of language. His findings of language explored through storytelling (such as with the frog story) and resulting subtle differences resulting languages being verb-framed or satellite framed. Furthermore, these are not the only distinctions between how actions are described in words. There are also many different ways to describe a single type of action (“walking”, “meandering”, “strolling”), which have, distinct but also very similar meanings. I was constantly reminded of the challenge as a child when asked to “define a word” and immediately wanting to use the word in the description!

I am beginning to link different concepts together from across the board of what we have learnt so far and it’s so exciting!