Language, vocabulary and structure

The readings for this week all focused on the complexities of vocabulary and how the definition of a word changes in the context it is used.  The Atkins & Levin paper explored the idea of synonyms, or rather near-synonyms, and showed how two words that were both synonymous to a different word were not necessarily synonymous to each other.  I found this very enlightening when considering how hard it is to define a word in terms of other words, as the definition of any given word is fluid based on the context in which it is used.  I thought that they summed up the paper very nicely at the end and showed the limitations of an electronic corpus when they said that a corpus can explain what a language does do, but not what it does not do.

            Slobin’s paper showed us that the fluidity of a word, or sentence’s, meaning changes between languages.  Slobin showed that V-languages and S-Languages use different grammatical structures, (verbs vs. adverbs) to specify the intended meaning of a sentence.  I thought that this was a really interesting point when applied to translation, because it definitively shows that languages cannot be accurately translated without an understanding of the language being translated and the language being translated into.  If we want to translate an V-Language into an S-Language, we must be able to find some modifier to a verb that is not present in the original language to compensate for the meaning lost in the direct translation to the S-Language. 

           

            I thought that Haspelmath’s explanation of the concepts of lexemes, morphemes and word families to be particularly interesting.  I was reminded of our exercise in class of defining Noun-phrases, verb-phrases, etc. when Haspelmath discusses how the hierarchal structures of language can compound within themselves.  Haspelmath shows that words can be treated similarly, with his example of “undoable” which can either mean that something can be undone or that something cannot be done.  This neatly ties back to the Atkins & Levin paper, which discussed how the definition of a word fluidly changes in the context of the words that surround it.  When considering all three of the authors, I thought that the readings for this week showed that vocabulary is just as varied and fluid as the structures we place them in to form language.  To me, it seems that there is no ‘kernel’ upon which any language is built upon.