"Popped out" vs. "Exit"?

This week’s reading provides significant insight into linguistics typology, morphology, and syntax.

Haspelmath explains the difference between lexemes and word-forms (word-forms belonging to lexemes), which are split into the shortest meaningful parts of expression or morphemes. Variations in morphemes contribute to variations in word-forms. Haspelmath also discusses how lexemes can be grouped into compounds that can either be endocentric, in which one of the elements is the ‘head’ of the construction – typically the right hand element, or exocentric, in which none of its constituents can be categorized as the formal head and its meaning can often not be identified from its constituent parts. Haspelmath illustrates the importance of the right hand element through many examples – in ‘traffic-light’, the second lexeme light is more important in terms of meaning than the first lexeme traffic as the compound describes a type of light and not traffic.  In this way, these compounds first use morphological trees and then use the phrase structure rules word tree to form a sentence. 

Atkins and Levins look into ‘near-synonyms’ of verbs through many examples, particularly the verb ‘shake’. They shed light on the significance of syntactic differences of semantically close words, which they state depends on whether or not the subject of the verb is the source of action stated or not and whether or not the verbs rely on internal or external causation. As I understood when each verb near-synonym of shake was used over the others, I realised how I have been choosing appropriate verbs in different contexts all my life but never really understood why – this supports Carnie’s argument that language use is innate.

Slobin explores linguistic typology by analysing different versions of the frog story to understand how the same story differs based on the specificity of verbs used in one language. Slobin specifically focuses on the difference between verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages. Verb-framed languages like Spanish clearly have path-verbs present and focus on the action itself; on the other hand, satellite-framed languages like English focus on how something is done rather than the action itself and specify the manner. Slobin notes that the English version of the story heavily relies on the reader’s inference about the details of the actions; in comparison, verb-framed languages rely on explicit descriptions and modifiers added to more generic verbs. This point was particularly interesting for me as I’ve never noticed this difference while writing Spanish and English essays, but always applied these rules instinctively, once again supporting Carnie’s argument as stated above. I’m also curious as to how this difference between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages affects the language of a native verb-framed speaker like Spanish when speaking in a satellite-framed language like English; is there diction choice less specific? Does there language seem less sophisticated to a native satellite-framed language speaker?