Chapter 9: the reading log

I found this chapter inspiring. This chapter inspired me. These two sentences are worded quite differently and yet, they can be interpreted very similarly. George Yule describes these examples as having different surface structures but a common deep structure. Moreover, the chapter itself defines surface structures and deep structure, along with other numerous syntax (the structure and ordering of components within a sentence) terms. Among these terms are structural ambiguity, recursion, syntactic description, phrase structure etc. Yule uses these terms to describe the rules of syntax and enhances these descriptions with tree diagrams, phrase structure rules and lexical rules.

I found it interesting to see such a simple sentence like “the small boy saw George with a crazy dog recently,” broken down piece-by-piece and sorted in a tree diagram to expose its true complexity. This sentence consisted of a mere nine words and yet seemed absurdly complicated when broken down; can you imagine a longer sentence? In fact, seeing syntax broken down raises my awareness of how advanced our understanding of language is, how do we construct sentences without thinking once about the structure? Yule’s chapter on syntax put me to think about our knowledge of language and how oftentimes we take it for granted.

Bill Bryson’s chapter on “Where Words Come From,” was powerful in its ability to portray English’s gift and curse: an array of vocabulary. Bryson talks about how some words like aposiopesis, a word for describing a sudden breaking off of thought (something I experience often), are specific in “describing the most specific of conditions, the most improbable of contingencies, the most arcane of distinctions” (68). In contrast, he also discusses some extreme gaps between other words like hard and soft or near and far. He eventually speaks about the theoretical processes between how these words come into the language.

I found the part about these gaps between words to be profoundly interesting. In writing about this phenomenon, Bryson exposes a link between language and society. Why is there a word to describe a person who has an urge to look through the windows of the homes he or she passes, but no words to describe the feelings between love and hate? Why is there a word in English to distinguish between brain and mind, but no such words to separate the two in Japanese? In English today, we have words like family and friends to separate our relationships with others, but in ancient Greece, they solely used the word philia. Language seems to change with societal concepts.

In another class I am currently taking, “The History of Medicine,” we were discussing some scientific research in biology. As we were reading an article by Anne Fausto-Sterling, the article mentioned how the language in the biological field promotes a certain direction in scientific inquiry. Thinking in this way, can our language condemn us in a sense? Take the word philia from ancient Greece for example, in the time of ancient Greece when philia described the relationships between people (whether it be between friends, family or even lovers), would it be possible for a person to separate the types of relationships? Even today, in terms of race, doesn’t this word promote a class system that becomes engrained in the society?

This chapter has put me to question our responsibility when creating words. If narrow-minded ideas create narrow-minded words, what impact will this have in our world?

In chapter 6 of his book “The Study of Language,” George Yule discusses the various types of ways in which words form. Yule describes how neologisms, or new words, come into our language through ten individual or combined possibilities: etymology, coinage, borrowing, compounding, blending, clipping, backformation, conversion, acronym or derivation. Interestingly, some of the ways neologisms form are clear, like through acronyms and coinage, while other ways are not as apparent, for instance, through blending or etymology.

Yule uses chapter 7 of his book to discuss the study of morphology (the basic forms in language) and the ‘elements’ of messages in a language. He introduces the reader to terms used by linguists to organize these ‘elements,’ also known as the morpheme, which is the “minimal unit of meaning or grammatical unit.” It was remarkable to see Yule’s chart on the various types of morphemes and understand the purpose for each term, like functional morphemes that serve largely as prepositions, conjunctions, articles and pronouns. The idea of morphemes in itself struck me as I read the chapter and I can see how understanding morphology can help a person predict the purpose of a word through the understanding of morphemes.

Finally, in chapter 8, Yule discusses grammar and its function in languages. He explains numerous rules in grammar adopted by languages, such as the traditional grammar used in English or grammatical gender as it is used in Spanish. In addition, Yule talks about the role of agreement as it applies to the grammar of a language. The structure of a language changes depending on categories like the number of nouns, the person (first-person, second-person or third-person), the tense (past, present or future), the voice (active or passive), and the gender (natural gender or grammatical gender). I found it most appealing when he discussed the range of ways to show the descriptive approach of analysis is used to describe the way a language is used.

These chapters struck me as I thought to myself how minimally I analyze language. I think back to elementary school, when we learned the proper ways to construct a sentence, and how I apply grammar instantaneously or use some of the rules of word formations to predict the meanings of unfamiliar words. Even as I came across the structural analysis approach, I recall practicing these “test-frames” in elementary school. These chapters remind me of many of the ways I, myself, have learned English. It was a welcomed reminder.