Rhetorical style, active and passive tense, creating new words

This week's readings introduced us to morphology. The Haspelmath readings were an introduction to the terms and categories of morphology. A “morpheme” is the smallest meaningful constitutent of a word. A lexeme is a set of word forms corresponding to a “dictionary word”; word-forms are separate words in speech or text. Distinct lexemes usually represent distinct concepts; distinct word-forms for a given lexeme, on the other hand, are usually just “inflected” to fit syntactical requirements, while still representing the same concept. Lexemes are “derived” from other lexemes in a word family, which is a set of related lexemes (usually with formed from some common base morpheme). I wondered whether words in a lexeme can have opposite meanings: would “readable” and “unreadable” be in the same lexeme? I'm guessing yes; they represent the same concept, with one negating the other. I also wondered: what percentage of new words usually formed of existing morphemes, and what percentage are monomorphemic? I'm guessing the first percentage is higher; it's more intuitive to create new words from existing units of meaning. Clearly we have some conventions that are fairly standard, too - like adding the morpheme "-s" in the majority of cases in which we form a plural.

The Atkins and Slobin readings seemed less focused on morphology. Atkins tried to determine the distinct semantic and syntactical characteristics of different lexemes represented by “shake,” “quiver,” and other words with similar meanings. This seems like a semantic and syntactical question: particularly, how does the meaning of a word relate to its grammatical usage in the sentence? He reached the conclusion that causative transitive uses are indications that a verb is externally caused; other uses indicate internal causation. For example, “shook” in “The woman shook the nail polish before opening it” is transitive and externally caused; the woman does the shaking. Some outside actor enacts force on some other object. However, in “the horror movie protagonist shook with fear,” “shook” is intransitive and is internally caused. Atkins pointed out that there are some idiosyncratic uses when verbs usually used intransitively are used transitively: e.g. “The man burped the baby.” But these uses are not common, and they often take on unique characteristics from the typical transitive, externally-caused verb, e.g. transitive uses of “quiver” often take on body parts of the thing quivering as objects.

One issue that Atkins/Levin didn't address but would have been interesting to explore is the usage of these verbs in the passive voice: for example, “was shaken” in “the nail polish was shaken by the woman” is intransitive but is externally caused. These conclusions could be expanded to reflect this: it seems that typically, when an externally caused verb that would usually be transitive is used in the passive voice, the thing causing the action is included as the object of a prepositional phrase. Considering voice seem very important when asking how internal versus external causation affects syntax.

The Slobin reading explored differing rhetorical styles between different languages. Verb-framed languages expressed paths of motion in the verb, while satellite-framed verbs expressed paths in some element associated with the verb. I was surprised that English was a satellite-framed verb: it seems that we have a variety of specific verbs associated with motion. There were interesting distinctions between V- and S-framed languages in a case study story; V-framed languages paid less attention to manner of motion, for example, than S-framed languages. Of course this raises interesting questions about how differing “rhetorical styles” among languages affect not just rhetoric in speech and writing, but how speakers of these languages see the world, particularly what aspects of the human experience they emphasize. I'm reminded of a Radiolab podcast I listened to years ago on colors; some tribes didn't have separate words for “blue” and “green” and couldn't tell the difference between the two. It's a distant comparison but the emphasis on different types of words from language to language certainly seems like it affects your perception or analysis of reality. I'm looking forward to exploring this question more.