Thoughts on 10/23 reading

Thoughts on 10/23 reading

The theme for the readings this week was categorizing language and constructing language rules. They all explored different nuances of languages and why it is easy or difficult to create rules for language

The Slobin paper focused on how different language families give different motion-event descriptions in the case study of frog-stories. These differering descriptions are caused by several factors in cluding linguistic structure, on-line processing, and cultural practices. The study examined three major compnents of motion among languages: manner of motion, path of motion, and landmarks. One finding was that between English and Spanish translations of a narrative involvign a boy climbing a tree and falling, the English translation was much more descriptive in its description of movement while Spanish had fewer words. In short, the languages differed in their attention to manner of movement. However, the Spanish translation was better at having descriptive descriptions of landmarks.

The Hapselmath readings explored morphology of words and how to create morphology tree from words or lexemes. The reading also introduced basic ideas such as the difference between a lexeme and word form. A lexeme is the dictionary definition of word such as the word "live". "Live" however can be used in many different ways in a sentence such as "lived", "lives", and "living". A lexeme is therefore a more abstract version of a word form and one lexeme actually maps to mulitple word-forms. The second Hapselmath reading introduced the notion of representing morphologically complex words with a hierarchical structure. A simple lexeme that can be broken down into parts is the compound lexeme. This referes to words made up of two smaller words such as "lipstick". It's interesting taht these words mainly consist of N+N combinations as opposed to N+V or V+N.

The Atkins Levin reading focused on how words are categorized in terms of a dictionary definition. It tries to uncover how words are grouped together in a dictionary and why near synonyms of words may differ syntactically despite their semantic closeness. For example, the "shake verbs" such as quake, shake, shiver, shudder, and tremble, are similar in meaning but different syntactically when combined with other nouns or subjects.

Overall, it's interesting to see how last week we categorized a sentence based on its individual parts and now these readings categorize a word based on its individual parts and compares specific words to each other. These readings made me think about how difficult it is to create rules to a language because there are so many levels of language to understand and so many exceptions to every rule. I think the most interesting thing was how certain languages have more words for certain of parts of speech such as motion and location, and I wonder how cultural values might affect these words.