I found the chapters on morphology to be really interesting. Many times I've looked into a dictionary and wondered why certain alternative forms of a word (e.g. read and reader) have their own definition out of the entry. Haspelmath's chapters talk a little about this when explaining the difference between a lexeme and a word form. "Read" and "reader" might be relatex, but "reader" encapsualates additional meaning that isn't captured in the meaning of "read" and will thus be given an additional dictionary entry. In contrast, rather than adding new meaning, the word "reads" is a product of our linguistic structure and can be included in the same lexeme as "read". The section on affixes was also interesting and makes me think of a language we studied in class, where the base transitive verb had suffixes and prefixes to indicate the number of subjects performing the action and number of objects on which the action was performed.
As a native English speaker, it feels a little arbitrary what we were taught in English language classes. For instance, we learned how to diagram sentences but never explicitly about concepts like roots and affixes. What makes one concept more important than the other? I imagine concepts that taught were thought to be helpful to learning the language (for instance, diagramming sentences would teach the basic components of sentences to show what makes a complete vs. run-on sentence), whereas concepts not mentioned could be interesting and relevant, but wouldn't improve one's ability to use the language. It also makes me wonder if English foreign language classes would teach such things – such as base modification and affixation. There are so many rules and exceptions that it wouldn't make sense to teach them all, but it seems like some of the rules would need to be mentioned. Consider "win" vs. "won". Not only is it unclear whether this is an example of affixation or base modification, but there is also the question of what determines that "win" is modified in such a way for past-tense, whereas the past-tense of "sin" is "sinned". Reading these chapters certainly opened my eyes to the complexity of these sorts of situations.
Hi Griffin!
ReplyDeleteI appreciated your thoughtful connections between the readings for this week and the real-life applications to language learning. One thing that your observations made me wonder was whether the way we teach language (ie, what we consider/what actually needs teaching) sheds insight on what the most difficult parts of language are. You say that "concepts not mentioned...wouldn't improve one's ability." It's interesting that (at least to my memory) we receive more instruction about syntactical rules on the sentence level than the individual word level. Does this imply a difference in the way we learn words vs. the way we learn sentences? Does it suggest it's harder to learn 'proper' grammar than proper word-forms? Or does it suggest that grammar is more algorithmic (infinite ability to create sentences), and word-concepts more of a matter of memorization (limited pool of proper words)?
(Posted by Hope Schroeder)
ReplyDeleteHi Griffin. I like the way you’ve brought up the discrepancies between how we learn English in English class and how we learn about linguistics. I’d also argue that if you’re learning a foreign language later than childhood, we probably learn more about the linguistic structure of that language than our own. I wonder who makes these decisions, and if we would be better served by learning the linguistic structure of our native tongue earlier. It sort of reminds me of how the citation format of lexemes varies in different languages. Who makes those decisions, also? Are they made for the convenience of the learner/reader or made to stay true to the linguistic characteristics of the language?