From intuition to the complexity of it

Where last week’s readings brought to light the role of intuition in language and its learning, this week’s readings highlighted the actual technical complexity of language. They explained the lack of systematicity within the individual accounts in language-learning and description (such as description, the complexity of morphemes and their formation, the hierarchical structure of morphological trees, and concluded by showing just how diverse these structures were across languages through the rhetorical style of how to search for a frog. 

In Building On A Corpus, Atkins researches the lack of descriptive coherence throughout a semantic field by taking into account a comprehensive investigation into this group of verbs- particularly quake, quiver, shake, shiver, shudder, tremble, and vibrate. He focuses on the transitive features of these words (internally versus externally causative transitive), and reflects on a particular conceptualization of the event described by that verb in order to explain the behavior of verbs in the English Language through a lexicographer's lens.  The reading offered an insight into the diversity that persists in one language alone, and highlighted the importance of intuitive learning versus acquired learning. Both of Haspelmath's pieces offered insight into the formation of morphemes and morphological structures. I was intrigued to learn about the structure of morphemes and how they form in the English language, and differ for every word, particularly the role of static (suffixes, share parts) or as the results of events (process terms). For me, the most interesting part of this reading was to note how alternation or base modifications is done in different languages, or the intricacies of common morphological operations across languages-- for example Haspelmath highlighted that in Albanian the plural of nouns can be formed by palatalizing the last consonant of the case ([k] becomes [c], whereas in English we usually add an ‘es’ at the end of the word, whereas in contrast in Hindi/Urdu, intransitive verbs are formed from transitive verbs by shortening the stem vowel khool is transitive for open while khul is intransitive for open. Further, the second Haspelmath article highlighted hierarchical structure in morphologically complex words. In fact, while reading it, I was thinking about the ancient language Sanskrit that I studied in middle school in India, and how all words were derived in Sanskrit, when the article stated it is one of the languages with richer inflection (a brilliant example in my opinion was deva-sena which is an army of gods). However, this discussion of Sanksrit also brought to light the fact that it is now a dying language, and it is so because similar to Latin, it is a purely written rather than spoken language. This for me, was a crucial moment in the readings because it tied back to the idea of allormorphs from Haspelmath's first reading, and the importance of allormorphs as devices meant to facilitate pronunciation. This was further brought to light by Slobin's paper, which once again reflected upon an explanation of the ways in which languages differ in rhetorical style, with a particular focus on manner of motion, path of motion, and grounds (landmarks). Personally for me, the most interesting part of this article was the comparison between English and ASL (American Sign Language), and how stories are told in both. It was intriguing to know that ASL is a verb-framed language and to apply what I had read to analyze path of motion in ASL. 

Therefore, the biggest learning experience from this weeks readings was that the study of linguistics, for me, has not only familiarized me with the technicalities of different languages, but also familiarized me with their structures because it forces me to look at Hindi versus english (such as through the Hindi/Urdu and English example), all languages I intuitively understand. Moreover, by showing the ingrained complexity in the structure of language, this week's readings made clear just how spectacular it is that we learn language intuitively at all, and what that says about our learning abilities. This is further compounded by the differences across languages in technicalities, and to imagine that people learn multiple languages intuitively, the rules of all we have not been able to formally quantify or qualify yet despite years of research, absolutely blows my mind.