Is Meaning Just Linguistic?

Our readings this week centered primarily around the concept of the significance of words, their meanings, and their parts. Haspelmath described the fundamentals of word-forms, lexemes, and morphemes and how these concepts affect our language. Atkins and Levin, on the other hand, observed corpus data to find contrasts amongst synonyms. Slobin took a slightly more holistic approach, exploring how “frog stories” are expressed differently from language to language.

While I found Slobin’s thoughts on how motion is expressed between different languages fascinating (for example, how S-languages and V-languages differ in their translations of verbs), I am intrigued by the foundational aspects of Haspelmath’s articles. Specifically, I am interested in the implications of base modification: is it possible for a base modification to be so subtle that the listener doesn’t pick up on it? Haspelmath explained many ways in which we garner and understand language using structures such as morphological trees, but the phonological differences seem to be much less direct to me. Consider the slight tonal difference between the word for “filth” and the word for “dirty” in Chalcatongo Mixtec. This difference seems to be something may be very evident to a native speaker, but what happens when you add in some “noise,” such as a very strong accent?

We don’t seem to be as affected by accents as English-speakers, likely because English uses significantly less base modification than other languages. We can still understand, for example, a British accent, an Australian accent, and a Southern accent with little difficulty. These accents have tone changes that are incredibly different from each other, and sometimes involve palatization or even removal of some sounds. But what about a language that does have lots of base modification?

Last year in Japanese class, a friend and I wrote our final skit around a man who wants to go to the hospital but ends up being sent to a beauty parlor instead. The misunderstanding that led to this unfortunate turn of events was the fact that in Japanese, beauty parlor is roughly pronounced byoin, while hospital is roughly pronounced byōin. Looking back, this seemingly ludicrous scenario does not seem so ridiculous at all. As a foreigner not used to the base modificational subtleties that differentiate particular words, I could easily see myself asking to go to the beauty parlor instead of the hospital. Now, I would like to consider a (slightly) contrived situation of cultural relativism. Consider that there exists some fictional island (that is far from Japan) of people all of whom speak Japanese with a distinct accent. They have hospitals, but there is no such thing as a beauty parlor. As such, they use the pronunciations for hospital and beauty parlor interchangeably. My question now is: does this change the lexicon at all? Can we still argue that the base modification exists, or is language inseparable from cultural environment?