Habituation

I believe that most of us have been habituated to associate words solely with the definition that is most often used for them. I’m a victim of this habituation. I am very often unable to notice the many nuances of word use that lie beyond a word’s most common meaning, and this happens to me both in English and in Spanish (which is my native language). For instance, despite knowing both languages well and often switching back and forth in my day-to-day, I was never able to recognize the manner of movement differences; as described by Slobin, there are no words like “climbing” or “clambering” in the Spanish narrative of the boy and the owl. However, now that I get to read about this and the other ways in which a word may be defined or associated – such as as a member of a word family or as an endocentric compound, as described by Haspelmath in Chapters 2 and 5 respectively – I usually agree with what is being said. The descriptions make sense to me. But I couldn’t notice these nuances by myself despite employing them all the time.

One example that illustrates this is the way Atkins talks about the use of some of the “shake” verbs, especially the differences between “shudder” and “shake”. The former verb has internal causation, meaning that other external things can’t cause something else to shudder; things only ‘shudder’ for themselves, as in the case of a body part or another self-controlled entity “shuddering”. Meanwhile, the latter verb “shake” has external causation. Something can “shake” for itself, but something can also cause something else to “shake”, as in the case of: “The man shook the bag.” Reflecting on my language use I find that I do most often employ the words in this manner. I use the words like this, but I do it automatically, never realizing that it is causation what draws the difference.

I found a similar pattern with Haspelmath’s compounds. Endocentric compounds are composed of two lexemes and the first lexeme (in the order of the compound word) modifies the second. Reading this, I notice now and agree with the structure of compounds, but I never realized this myself. On a side note, I wonder whether this applies to every single compound word. If so, I wonder how do words like “makeup” or “without” fit into this picture; it seems hard to imagine how a word like “with” can modify “out.”

It seems like last week’s reading also referenced this theme of automatically doing certain things in language without realizing they were happening. For instance, we restructure syntax trees in our minds (based on context) to account for different meanings of a sentence. I wonder how this week’s readings relate to those, and if they can lead us closer to identifying whether we have an innate ability for language that allows us to automatically perform certain language-related functions.