Language And Structure

A theme I’ve been noticing more and more as we move through the course is the idea of the structure of Language: that it can be consistently broken down and separated into smaller constituents and that at each of these many levels can we discover something new about Language. 

Every reading we’ve done introduces more ambiguity into this question, while also reemphasising the importance of ascribing structure to language. In particular, this week’s readings cast a bright light on the two sides of this debate, and I found it interesting to see how my perspective on this evolved as I read further. 

Atkins and Levin explore the various uses of near-synonym verbs through a case study of 7 words whose meanings are similar to that of the word shake. They argue that the idea of internal versus external causation provides an explanatory mechanism for seemingly inconsistent semantic behaviour. I’d imagine, then, that if presented with the idea of a structure for Language, they’d wholeheartedly agree, given that the intent for their paper is to demonstrate that certain principles can govern the behaviour of words.

However, ideas of causation abstract away from merely the words in a sentence and start dealing with the intent of their source, and so it seems the system that Atkins and Levin would support would probably involve some sort of social cueing as well.

The ideas Hapselmath covers in his chapters forego any non-linguistic factors. Here, meaning is purely a product of the morphemes used in a word and through the use of morphological trees, we can even explain a word’s multiple meanings. Therefore, Hapselmath too seems a large proponent of bringing rigorous structure to Language.

However, I’d imagine that given Slobin’s paper, he’d argue against a universal structure for language. He discusses the various approaches languages take to describe motion. English verbs, for example, tend to convey more about the manner in which an action is taken as compared to Spanish in which more words must be used to express the same manner. I think Slobin would argue that this evidence for multiple, more language-dependent structures, which I think he hints at by delineating between V- and S-languages. I think the natural next question here would be why some languages evolve to be of one type, and other languages evolve to the other type. 

The 3 authors this week all discussed three different levels of Language and whether there was a universal structure at these levels. I don’t think their news are necessarily incompatible with each other, but I do think it’s interesting that the same question can be asked while probing multiple different parts of Language and that to answer it, we must constantly use new pieces of evidence and gain new insights.