Recursive Structures and Circular Definitions

This week's reading present a collection of ideas that both relate to past articles and propose new theories. Haspelmath's articles discuss word forms and lexemes, as well as other concepts such as phonological and morphological environments, morphemes, and allomorphs. He also delves into the ideas of morphological trees and compounding. Slobin departs from the introduction of terms and instead looks into the distinct qualities of different languages' "frog stories", highlighting the use of differing verbs in each tongue. Lastly, Atkins and Levin explore the similarities and differences in a group of synonyms (in particular, the group of synonyms revolving around the word shake). They look at corpus data and dictionary entries to pick apart these comparable words, looking at aspects such as transitivity and internal / external causation.

I found Haspelmath's discussion of morphemes to be very reminiscent of our discussion of phonemes in earlier readings and lectures. We talked about phonemes as a unit of sound, and similarly morphemes are considered to be the "atoms" of words. They act as the small meaningful segments that can comprise a larger, aggregated word. Digging even deeper into this likeness, phonemes have allophones while morphemes have allomorphs; these are by no means identical, but they revolve around the idea of the same structure being pronounced or interpreted in different ways. Haspelmath's discussion of compounding and the use of the hierarchical trees to depict a word's structure also add another element to the syntax trees we worked with this past week. To me, it seemed like this addition links many topics together; sentences can be broken down into different phrases, phrases can be broken down into separate words, and words can be broken up into different morphemes and / or phonemes. This recursive structure of sentences truly has given me a better way to picture sentences and think of their distinct components.

Atkin and Levin's article brings up a variety of interesting points as well. When discussing groups of synonyms, they utilize hypotheses and test cases in a scientific method (substantiating Carnie's claim that linguistics occupies the field of science). Moreover, they discuss how many well-known dictionaries actually define synonyms in terms of one another. I definitely could relate to this observation, and I started thinking about how I could define basic words such as "large" and "small". In the end, it was hard for me to describe something without resorting to using an antonym or a synonym. This form of circular definitions definitely raises an interesting point as to how we have an intuitive sense of what words mean, without having a very efficient system with which to define them.

Lastly, I was also intrigued by Slobin's discussion of the frog story in different languages. I thought that the difference between S-languages and V-languages added a very unique distinction to the varying syntactic rules of contrasting tongues. As the article pointed out, English does possess a large host of manner verbs, many of which are synonyms with minuscule differences in their definitions. For simplicity, I wonder why the developers of our language decided to create so many variations of the same word instead of using different phrases to modify them. This article reminded me of certain ideas in 1984, where the government tried to simplify words by using a well-known stem and numerous prefixes and suffixes. Slobin's intention was more to examine the difference in verbs of various languages, but it fostered some ideas about how our language has expanded and the host of rules that we have had to develop to keep up with its growth.