Haspelmath and more!

This week the reading seemed to be about categorization of language and creating  rules about language.

An interesting aspect of the Atkins Levin paper is when they talked about synonyms and how the way that we use synonyms differs even though the words should be interchangeable. An example that they give is of "shake" verbs like quake, quiver, shiver, and shudder. The way that we use these verbs changes depending on the words that we use around them, such as other verbs and nouns. However, I also think that we must consider the connotations associated with these words, Even though they all mean similar things in their denotation, their connotations are different and therefore relate to how they are not actually interchangeable.

In the Slobin paper he talked about motion-event descriptions. He divided these into three categories: manner of motion, path of motion, and landmarks. I thought it was interesting when he compared motion-events between languages. For instance, the way that verbs are conjugated and nouns are declined that provide specific meaning. He gave an example in which he compared speakers of V-language (Spanish, French, Italian, Hebrew, Turkish) and speakers of S- language (English, German, Dutch, Mandarin, and Russian), those who spoke S-language were more detailed in their accounts, however those who spoke V-language were more efficient with their language. I think that this is interesting, and it's hard to say which is "better". I think that while I see the appeal of more efficient language, I would rather have more information to go off of.

In the Haspelmath reading we learned about morphology (the study of the forms of words), lexemes, and word-form. A single lexeme has many word-forms that associate with it. I think that the idea of word-forms is really interesting as it reminds me how connected and logical language can be. Merely using prefixes and suffixes can take a lexeme and make so many derivations. I think that this is conceptually interesting because it allows us to really look into word meanings and how the meaning of words change when only small changes are applied.

In the second Haspelmath we learned how to make morphological trees. I thought that this was interesting because it allows us to take a closer look into how language is created. Compounds are especially fun to think about because we literally just shove two words together to make usually a very literal word -- ie. lipstick is a stick for your lips and a pancake is a cake that is made in a pan.

These readings definitely made me think harder about how language is created and how the rules that we make to govern language are created and utilized.