Movement, Morphology and Lexomes oh my!

This we we read 4 different articles by three different authors. All of these articles took a different dive into linguistics look at how the nuances of language create certain patterns and rules.

Hapselmath explored how to create morphology tree from words or lexemes as well as the difference between a lexeme and word form. A lexeme is the dictionary definition of word such as the word "smile". "Smile", however can be modified to take on many different forms such as smiling, smiled etc. A lexeme is therefore a more abstract version of a word form and one lexeme actually maps to mulitple word-forms like I just described. Hapselmath then introduces representing morphologically complex words with a hierarchical structure. A simple lexeme that can be broken down into parts is the compound lexeme. This refers to words made up of two smaller words such as "sunrise". These noun verb compound words from a lexical standpoint shows the connection between the object and the verb as a single entity, which in case of sunrise, literally emblemifies the noun of a sun rising.

Slobin frames his paper on the study of frog motions framed around sentence phrases. For example, in madarin, the verb for "to go" is "Yao qu" which is similar in structure to certain English verb phrases. These differering descriptions are caused by several factors in cluding linguistic structure, on-line processing, and cultural practices. The study cites manner of motion, path of motion, and landmarks to define motions.. One finding was that between English and Spanish translations of a narrative involvign a boy climbing a tree and falling, the English translation was much more descriptive in its description of movement while Spanish had fewer words. In short, the languages differed in their attention to manner of movement. However, the Spanish translation was better at having descriptive descriptions of landmarks.

The last reading by Atkins Levin focuses on how words are categorized in terms of a dictionary definition. It tries to uncover how words are grouped together in a dictionary and why near synonyms of words may differ syntactically despite their semantic closeness. For example, the "shake verbs" such as quake, shake, shiver, shudder, and tremble, are similar in meaning but different syntactically when combined with other nouns or subjects.

I really enjoyed these rules and deep dive into linguistics. It's interesting to decompose the language into more concrete sub pieces. These sub pieces come together to form more abstract meaning which is really interesting.