Words, Words, Words

Atkins-Levins begins the discussion of semantics and the trouble with word definition by using the example of “shake” verbs. The “shake” verbs are quake, quiver, shake, shiver, shudder, tremble and vibrate and as you can see (if you are a proficient English speaker) the 7 verbs have very similar definitions however they still have significant differences in how they are used. Atkins-Levins discusses how the difference between these near-synonyms syntactically can be immense while their semantic meaning is very close because of the concept of internal versus external causation. He then finishes on a discussion about electronic corpuses and how while they are a necessity for the professional lexicographer, the lexicographer’s primary responsibility is that of the average dictionary user and therefore certain complexities must be left out of traditional dictionaries.

One thing that this part of the reading brought to mind for me is the classic “chair” problem. This is a common Philosophical problem in which we often find that it is incredibly difficult to accurately define the word chair. This problem is prominent throughout language and is one of the reasons why definitions and defining a word can be so difficult. Atkins-Levins attempts to respond to this issue by utilizing the difficulty of the difference between the “shake” verbs, and showing how by using the words around these verbs, one can find the correct definition.

Haspelmath continues this conversation by delving deeper into the subject of how words are formed and what are the different parts of that make up a “word”. This discussion is initiated by the differentiating of a lexeme (a “dictionary word” like live, is often thought of as a set of word-forms) and a word-form (a “text word” like lives, lived, living, which all derive from the lexeme live, are words that can be pronounced and used in texts, and every word form belongs to one lexeme). One of my favorite parts of this reading was the use of hierarchical structures such as trees to explain how certain words are formed. This was a nice parallel to the use of tress in the understanding of sentence structures.

Lastly Slobin talks about the differences across languages and the trouble with translation. There are two main types of languages S-Languages and V-Languages. S-Languages stand for satellite framed languages where the sentence is driven by an adverb, or an element associated with the verb. V-languages stand for verb framed languages where the sentence is driven by the verb, as in English. This distinction is very important when it comes to translation and brings about the point that there are certain things someone must know about both languages to be able to correctly translate words and sentences. This idea is one Slobin talks about in his conclusion, stating that the job of a typological linguist is to find and explain co-occurences across languages.