Synonyms, morphological trees, and trees with owls in them

The Atkins & Levin paper focused on the similarities and differences in usage of some near-synonyms of the word shake. I found Table 4 near the end of the paper to be especially interesting, because it provided a useful visual representation of the types of nouns that are used with these verbs. By looking at this chart, you can easily see that the words tremble and quiver seem to be the most widely used of these seven verbs, or the words that have the most diverse usage with types of nouns. They can be used as verbs with many different types of nouns, including ‘animal,’ ‘body part,’ and ‘vehicle.’ Atkins & Levin note that tremble and quiver tend to be found not only with a range of subjects that have “self-controlled bodies,” such as animals, body parts, and people, but also with subjects such as the earth, trees, and light. At the end of the paper, they remind us that although corpus evidence can tell us what a language does, no corpus can tell us what a language does not do. This is important, because none of the rules specified in this paper are to be taken as the final word on the matter, but simply as trends that have been seen in this data set.

The Haspelmath papers had a broader focus - they talked about hierarchical structures, morphological trees, and morphemes. The example of the word ‘undoable’ was interesting, because it illustrated how you deconstruct a word that has multiple meanings, and how hierarchical structures clearly show these differences. By just looking at the structure, you can see that the verb itself differs, even though the word is spelled the same in both cases. This was a formulaic way to look at language, which helped me to understand and be interested in this subject more than before, because I am more of a math-minded person.

I enjoyed the Slobin paper the most out of this week’s readings. It looks at the differences between languages that can be observed when describing scenes depicting a boy and an owl in a tree. Slobin notes that the American English version of this narration is almost entirely inferred information that is not concretely drawn out in the picture and that the verbs used are very descriptive (tumble, pop up). In comparison, the Spanish versions of this account use more generic verbs (subir - climb, salir - exit, caerse - fall) to narrate the pictures. I found this very interesting, because as someone who has studied abroad in Spain and taken many Spanish language classes, this was one difference that I, too, have noticed between Spanish and English. In English, we have countless descriptive verbs that we use to describe not only what someone does, but the way in which one does something. For example, we can say that someone dashes out the door in English. In Spanish, we would say that that person corre rápidamente (runs quickly) out the door. This is the case for most descriptive verbs in English, that when translated to Spanish, tend to be translated into a generic verb with an adverb that describes it.