The readings for this week made me think a lot about how the external manifestation of language corresponds to internal representations of the world. In the "Lexemes and Word Forms" reading, I was particularly impressed by the idea of a lexeme, and how one abstract 'dictionary word' could manifest itself in many different word forms. To me, the multiple permutations of the same lexeme (but with different variations on the same essential meaning) suggested some form of cognitive organization of concepts: some general sense of 'live'-ed-ness that we are able to re-shape and concretize through our variations on "living," "lived," or "lives." On the other hand, the difficulty in pinning down a structure between synonyms, as established in Atkins and Levin reading made me wonder whether these variations within word forms of lexemes was a sign of some cognitive organization, or simply a quirk of how language turned out over time. 

The Slobin reading also brought me back to this idea of the connection between our perspective on the world and our use of language, but from a more zoomed out view. Instead of looking at just at the English language, Slobin compared the form English verbs took with that of verbs from different language. It was surprising to me to see that English had more satellite verbs than Spanish did, and made me wonder if we conceived of the world and the way we interact with it slightly differently--if our different use of language also corresponded to a different cognitive permutation.