Still talking about innate vs. not innate, and wondering about different experiences of emotion in differen cultures.

This weeks covered widely morphology and the semantics they give rise to.

In the Haspelmath readings we heard about the difference between word forms and lexemes, the difference between between being an inflection (one of the forms of a lexeme) and a derivation (one of the lexemes in word family), morphemes (the smallest unit of meaning in a language), bases vs. roots and affixes, and lastly formal operations on words that change their meanings.  In the second reading we looked at different forms of compounds such as endocentric, exocentric, and appositional compounds which differ in whether they have external or internal semantic heads and a single or multiple semantic heads.

I was struck both by how different languages follow similar conventions such as stemming of the first word in a compound. This wasn't the only convention shared across multiple languages and I wonder about why the similarities exist. Is it because these languages that overlap share origins or is it evidence in some sense of innate rules, that allow us to speak and interpret language. This is not to say these rules, if they do exist, don't manifest themselves in different ways in different cultures, evident by the fact that there are formal operations that exist in some but not other languages.

In reading Slobin explore the differences in rhetorical style and how different languages convey motion in different ways (specifically between satelite and verb focused languages) it made me wonder about the ways the semantic conventions in different languages affect the ways individuals raised speaking that language express and even typically experience emotion. Of course, I imagine that it goes the other way in that cultural tendencies around things like emotional expression shape the kinds of developments made and not made in a language.

Reading about the implications of the electronic dictionary in the Atkins reading I wonder what it would take to create a new dictionary I wonder what it would take to create a more helpful dictionary for language learners that helps them pick up on the contexts a verb is typically and not typically used because it is not always obvious.