How do morphology and semantics work together? This is the question explored in all of the readings this week. The Haspelmath readings give a very comprehensive introduction to morphology, the study of words and their various forms. Starting out by giving comprehensive definitions of lexemes (i.e. the "base form" of a word), word-forms (i.e. variations of lexemes), and morphemes (i.e. the smallest indivisible parts of a word-form) in the first reading, the second reading shows how to apply those basics in the creation of morphological trees.
Meanwhile, the Atkins-Levin paper focuses on the ways that linguists can use the basic building blocks of morphology laid out in Haspelmath's readings to create hypotheses about semantic uses of language over a large corpus -- specifically looking at how the syntactic usage of near-synonyms (namely, "shake" verbs) can differ despite their similarities in semantics. I especially enjoyed the emphasis on the "electronic corpus" in this paper -- how modern technology allows linguists to get more data and therefore come to more sound conclusions regarding morphology and word usage.
However, I was most intrigued by the Slobin reading, which broadens the scope of the previous papers even further by focusing on how morphology and semantics in the same story vary across languages, specifically languages that are satellite-focused (that is, languages in which the manner of a verb is specified by a preposition, as in English), or verb-focused (that is, languages in which the manner of action is contained within the verb itself, as in Spanish).
This was a distinction I had never really considered before -- as someone who enjoys creative writing in his spare time, I've long thought about how a verb like "ascend" is obviously much more descriptive than a verb like "go," but I had never really thought about why. "Go" does not contain much information in and of itself, and only when you suffix it with "in" do you get the same semantic meaning as "ascend," but with somehow less spark. That being said, when language is kept simpler, it sometimes can present a clearer picture of a situation, especially in storytelling.
This becomes especially interesting in relation to memory. Take the memory experiment that you'll learn about in any psych class here at Stanford, but is also brought up in this TED Talk. Respondents witnessed a car crash and then were asked how fast the cars were going when they either "ran into" each other, "crashed" into each other, etc., with different words describing the action. Respondents who were asked with the word "hit", simply a verb, remembered the cars as going slower than those who were asked with the words "smashed into", a satellite-framed expression. How morphology and semantics relates to memory is certainly an area that is very worthy of further study.
I really appreciated how you tied in the linguistic differences between a satellite-framed and verb-framed expressions with psychology and memory with the car-crash example! Your blog post is really informative and I too would be thoroughly interested to learn more about how morphology and semantics relate to memory.
ReplyDeleteThe TED talk and your point are really interesting! It had me thinking about George Carlin's stand up where he talks about euphemisms (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuEQixrBKCc). Its crazy how much words can affect how we perceive and understand things. Kind of makes you double think when someone says "words are just words" when they actually seem to be so much more than that. Anyways awesome post :)
ReplyDeleteThe memory experiment you mention is an interesting - and rather sobering - demonstration both of the visceral connotations of word choice and also of the flexibility of memory and the power of suggestion. If that experiment shows that the words others use to describe an event can influence your recollection of it, a complementary study from Stanford suggests that the words you yourself would use to describe the event can similarly influence your memory. Let's say that John bumps a table, sending a fragile vase crashing to the floor. In English, we would probably say, "John broke the vase." However, Spanish and Japanese speakers would be more likely to factor the unintentional nature of the event into their speech, saying something like "the vase broke itself." The Stanford study showed videos of both intentional and accidental incidents like the vase one described above, and found that while English and Spanish speakers were equally likely to remember the individuals who had deliberately caused damage, Spanish speakers were less likely than their English counterparts to remember the individual who inadvertently caused the accident. It's interesting to think that the use of agentive or non-agentive language, even if it's not spoken aloud, may affect what we remember.
ReplyDeletehttps://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=29489