来和去 (lai he qu) - Directional complement verbs in Chinese that separate the language into a new category

This week’s first reading (Atkins) discuss the behaviors of near-synonyms of words and highlight the idea that no corpus can provide negative information (negative information tells us what we CANNOT use). Before, I always thought that meanings often dictate how verb act in a sentence. It turns out that verb meanings do not determine verb behaviors. This is best illustrated by the extreme example of “buy” and “sell” when the two basically describe the same action (same meaning) but are projected from different perspectives (different behaviors. From this reading, I started to notice more about the transitivity of words. For instance, the group words of “jump”: leap, spring, bound, hop, and skip. Each of these near-synonyms has some semantic closeness but none is perfectly interchangeable for the others.

The second reading (Haspelmath) introduces the concept of lexemes and word-forms. Through this reading, I understand the difference between lexemes and word families. For instance, the lexeme is “compare.” Its word-forms includes “compares, compared, and comparing” while the word families would include “comparison, comparable, and comparative.” My first reaction after reading the first few pages is that my native language (Vietnamese) is not like this at all. I also took Chinese Mandarin so I understand that my native language and Chinese Mandarin both do not inflect the verbs. Instead, we have auxiliaries to modify the actions. The verbs themselves do not change. For instance, “đang ăn” means “eating” and “sắp ăn” means “will eat.” The verbs neither change for the tense nor the gender and number of the subjects.

The last reading (Slobin) examines three major components of motion: manner of motion, path of motion, and grounds. Through this, I understand that S-framed languages (English, German) have manners infused closely with the verbs while V-framed languages take this more as a “luxury” since manner and path are clearly separated. What I find most interesting from this reading on typology is how a change the structure of verbs can radically change the narrative effects. Another interesting point I picked up is the proposed third type called equipollently-framed languages instantiated by Chinese Mandarin. As a learner of the language, I have noticed the phrase 飞出来 (fei chu lai) before and do notice that there seems to be a specificity of path and manner in the phrase. After the reading, I can now definitely explain what I had failed to articulate before.