After reading Haspelmath’s descriptions of morphological patterns and relationships and the hierarchical structures of endocentric compounds, Atkins and Levin’s studies of near-synonyms and their different syntactic behavior through corpus, dictionary, and linguistic perspectives as well as internal versus external causation, and Slobin’s discussion of verb-framed and satellite-framed languages, I was particularly interested in Atkins and Levin’s ideas about the subtlety of word meaning and syntactic deportment.
Although many words may possess close semantic meanings and content, the nouns they act upon or take as subjects may not show much of the same similarity! I was drawn to the example from Atkins and Levin showing that the word “shake” could apply to everything from sounds and explosions to emotions and the human body. However, other words that were “near-synonyms” showed very different behavior, especially with regards to the idea of transitivity. This idea is pushed even further when we look at dictionaries—different dictionaries are constrained differently.
This idea in particular appealed to me as a speaker of both English and Chinese—growing up in a household speaking Mandarin, my mother often said, “I can’t find the right word to express this in English.” There would often be a word, a “near-synonym” that came close, but somehow didn’t fit grammatically or would slightly alter the meaning of the phrase. I was reminded of this recently when I tried to explain a Chinese song that I love, “因为爱情,” to my friend by translating each line. In Chinese, the lyrics are beautiful, but I found them so difficult to express in English! When I translated them into near-synonyms, the English version sounded awkward. For instance, the line “因为爱情 怎麽会有沧桑” is a beautiful line in Chinese, but the English translation is roughly “Because of love, how can we have vicissitudes”—both the meaning and the grammatical structure seem stilted. This may be owed to the compromises needed to address the syntactically different behaviors of near-synonyms. Atkins and Levin speak to this idea briefly when they give the example of “blushing,” which can refer to both the state itself and a change in state, which are often conflated in translation equivalents. Slobin’s ideas also play into these concepts, as he describes differences between verb-framed and satellite-framed languages and how cultural narrative practices can impact the use of language.
Finally, the idea of language differences across cultures due to changes in morphology is something that also draws upon and contrasts with what we have been learning in the past few weeks in class. While we might rely on a Universal Grammar that gives us an innate ability to acquire and interpret language, does that interpretation shifts in accordance to cultural practices, as Slobin references, and do differences in Haspelmath’s hierarchical structures of morphologically complex words change these morphological relationships during translation?
Katherine,
ReplyDeleteI'm very interested in your anecdote about translating music. It seems like a major difficulty in having music span across cultures and languages is this near-synonym problem. When listening to foreign music, I sometimes find myself appreciating how good the singers are, but with no understanding of the language, their voices become almost like instruments to me. Listening to an English translation of the song, it seems as though something is distinctly missing, even though all of the "instruments" are in place. I am interested in knowing whether you think that translating word-for-word is as important as translating more nebulous concepts at the expense of more explicit meaning. So in response to your question about Universal Grammars, I believe that the interpretation must shift, but I wonder, in turn, whether that shift is a bad thing at all.