Sally shook at the thought of it: Understanding morphology and meaning

This weeks readings focus on morphology, semantic meaning and differences at the word-level, and how the structure of our languages change the way in which we communicate.

Haspelmath’s section on lexemes and word-forms focuses on the basis of morphology—words. “Words” isn’t the proper term to use here, since “words” are either lexemes or word-forms. I found the concept of morphemes as the basis of meaningful language fascinating. It reminded me of studying vocabulary as a child and learning about suffixes, prefixes, and word stems and learning how to infer meaning about a word through these morphological parts. Plurals in Somali are often formed by duplifixes, which I found very interesting. To show plurality of a noun, the last syllable is said twice, which to me sounds like a very obvious way of showing multiplicity. If we said “Bottle-tle” for expressing two bottles, it’s a very visceral expression for having multiple bottles, because it feels like you really are emphasizing having multiple.

Haspelmath’s section on morphology focuses on compound words and their hierarchical structure. There are endocentric compounds that have head-dependent structure and exocentric compounds, which less frequently have hierarchical structure and lack a semantic “head” inside of the compound. As a German language student, I found this reading particularly interesting because of the frequency of compound nouns in German. The morphological structure of these compound words can be broken down and the gender will always follow the head, which I found to be helpful advice for deciding the gender of a compound noun in German.

Slobin’s paper characterizes and categorizes languages by the type of verb-orientation that sentences use. There are verb-framed languages (V-languages) where the main verb communicates the path of motion and satellite-framed languages (S-languages) where the path of movement is communicated by elements associated with the verbs. What I found most interesting about this typology was how the structure of verbs changes the narrative effects of the language. To me, although biased as an English speaker, which is an S-language, I feel like S-languages lend themselves more to narrative flow and specificity, due to the many phrasing options for each action because of rich lexicons of manner verbs.

The Atkins and Levin paper covers near-synonyms found in our large, relatively new electronic corpuses. Words that can seem like synonyms are common in many ways, but there are differences in their use that make them uniquely different from other similar-meaning words. It’s interesting to focus on the many meanings of a verb and how in some contexts the word can be switched out for a synonym, and in other contexts it cannot be. An example of this would be “The elevator shuddered” and “Sally shuddered at the thought of it.” In the first example, shuddered could be replaced by “shook,” but “shook” in the latter example would not covey the same meaning. I imagine learning these differences as a non-native speaker is extremely difficult.