Haspelmath’s first article discusses the concepts of lexemes, word forms, morphemes, and allomorphs. It compares how citation forms in various languages handle the lexeme listed in the dictionary. For example, the first person singular present form of verbs is listed in Latin dictionaries, and the third person singular present form is listed in Arabic dictionaries.
This made me curious who it is that makes these decisions. Are they decisions made based on convenience for linguists, or on usefulness to the user?
Haspelmath introduces the concept of morphemes, the smallest unit of language form that ascribes meaning in a word. In “reads”, the “s” is a morphing imbuing the word with the present tense. English has various similar morphemes for making things plural, like cats and dogs (being pronounced different, cats and dogz, respectively) having the same spelling and the same morphemes but presenting different sounds, called allomorphs. Haspelmath’s second article concerns morphological trees and how different languages handle compounding language. For example, English has a lot of compound words, such as swordfish. “Fish” is the “head” in English, and “sword’ modifies it as the dependent; a swordfish is a type of fish. However, this is an arbitrary order that even English breaks sometimes. Hierarchical compound phrases like “Indiana University Linguistics Club” are discussed. The entire thing is a hierarchical noun phrase, but Indiana University is a type of university and a linguistics club is a type of club, showing hierarchy.
The Atkins, Levin paper took the example of a set of words having to do with the word “shake,” such as quiver, shudder, tremble, and vibrate. They discuss the huge differences in syntactic behavior between them, frequently in terms of their transitivity, even within a group of near synonyms.
The Atkins, Levin article related to Slobin’s examination of so-called “frog stories” in verb-framed vs satellite-framed languages. The idea is that some languages rely heavily on nuanced motion verbs to describe the manner of motion rather than specific position. Slobin examines this idea by comparing the descriptions of a series of images about a frog to learn about how each language handles describing motion and position. This made me wonder about whether we truly see things differently depending on what language we are communicating in, constrained to the formal logic of each language. Do speakers of two languages strain to fit the motion-verb rhetorical style of one into the other? What is the outcome of this? It also made me deeply consider the tough decisions translators must make. Translating too literally from a V to an S language could result in too literal of location descriptions, and translating from an S to a V language might be difficult to find matching motion verbs, or sound too unspecific. It reminds me why some people learn languages just to read a book in its untranslated form. It also makes me wonder what the conventions for professional translators are on these issues, and to what degree translators agree to take liberty with these things.
I don't know if I agree that English can often break the compound noun ordering rule. I can't think of any examples right now, but this general structure comes from German, where nouns can be added to each other to no end, yet the properties of the resulting noun are always taken from the last noun in the word, as it is the "head" noun, and all the others are modifiers.
ReplyDeleteI think it is super interesting how you brought up that translations between S and V languages may have trouble in differing ways, I hadn't thought about the specifics of that.