[Lingtyp] wordhood

Hagège Claude claude-hagege at wanadoo.fr
Mon Nov 13 16:34:43 UTC 2017


 

Dear all,

 

        In this discussion on wordhood, iIt may be useful to add  that it is true that we typologists do not work with the notion « word », but with notions  like morphemes, compounds, derivatives, internal phoneme variations (e.g. Hebrew, Arabic, Rotuman, strong verbs in English (as well as German, Swedish, etc.), affixes (provided these are not defined in a circular way  (cf. Martin’s (12-11, 15.48) definition  « An affix is a bound form that always occurs together with a root of the same root-class and is never separated from the root by a free form or a non-affixal bound form »). Even though these notions are, to some extent, fuzzy (but mostly identifiable, as illustrated, for example, by the way R.M.W. Dixon writes seam-str-ess (Making New Words, OUP, 2014, 324). We prefer working with these notions rather than with the notion « word ». However, words have a phenomenal, and not noumenal or Platonic, existence :

1)  In all languages, including stress-final ones, words are identified and delimited by stress ;

 

2)  Typologists still work with the tripartite distinction introduced, in the German Romantic era, by  the Schlegel brothers (1808, 1818), and then taken over (1836-1860) by Humboldt, Bopp, Pott, Schleicher, Steinthal and others, among whom Duponceau, who, based on Amerindian languages, introduced in 1838 the notion of polysynthetic languages. Now, we  should not loose sight that this tripartite distinction is entirely based on the notion of word : it is the structure of the word which underlies the isolating, agglutinative and flexional language types ;

 

3)  « word » is admittedly not a specific linguistic notion. It is, to a large extent, a graphic notion. It is significant, for instance, that, as recalled by   Tianqiao citing Packard (12-11, 17.43),  the Chinese equivalent of « word » is    字 zì, which actually means « Chinese  character » ( 词 cí  is a grammatical notion, and is barely used when simply referring to words, as in  他说话字字清楚 (tā « he » shuōhuà « speak » zì « word » zì « word » qīngchu « clear ») « when he speaks every word is clear ». But, more precisely, the notion of « word »  is, essentially, an institution. It is significant to observe that translators work with words, and they often strive to render, as much as possible, a word of the source language with a word of the target language, even though this is often very difficult.

 

Best,

 

Claude (Hagège)

 

 

 

De : Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] De la part de Martin Haspelmath
Envoyé : lundi 13 novembre 2017 10:22
À : lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Objet : Re: [Lingtyp] wordhood

 

Yes, Peter Arkadiev is quite right to point out that the root concept as tentatively defined by me earlier (in 2012 <http://phonetics.linguistics.ucla.edu/wpl/issues/wpl17/wpl17.html> ) does not extend readily to cases like English "sing/sang", let alone Arabic "kataba/yaktubu".

But remember that typological classification does not have to be exhaustive (unlike description, which must cover everying in a given language): Typological studies focus on clear similarities and clear differences between languages, but there are also many aspects of language structure that are not readily comparable.

I learned this lesson originally from Bickel & Nichols's 2005 WALS chapter on "structure sampling". In their sub-chapter on "Sampling case and tense formatives" (http://wals.info/chapter/s5), they say:

"... This makes it impossible to typologize whole languages for fusion and exponence. In response to this, we sampled individual formatives..."

A similar point was made by Bill Croft in his 2016 LT contribution <https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity.2016.20.issue-2/>  on comparative concepts (§5):

"... “large” conceptual categories are in fact not good comparative concepts, and typologists use narrower conceptual categories or even individual tokens (as in elicitation from a stimulus like a cutting/break video clip). Language-specific categories are often large, especially if they are defined by occurrence in a role in just one construction, and are defined as all elements that occur in that constructional role."

Likewise, Matthew Dryer points out in the current discussion that comparative concepts need to be narrower than descriptive categories:

"there is often a way to define one’s comparative concept in a “narrower” way so that at least some problematic cases can be classified"

So yes, the Arabic "root" concept needs to be very abstract, so abstract that it no longer matches my comparative root concept (and the same applies to English "sing/sang" etc.). But this does not mean that the comparative root concept needs to be abstract in a similar way. I think that if it is not sufficiently concrete, it cannot serve as a comparative concept anymore, because only fairly concrete concepts can be applied across languages using the SAME criteria.

If you now wonder whether I would be forced to say that Arabic is a language without roots, the answer is yes, probably, to a large extent (though there are probably a few noun roots, i.e. forms whose vocalic pattern does not have an additional singular meaning, e.g. roots of mass nouns). This may sound unacceptable to some, but note that Arabic-like languages are extremely rare, so the fairly concrete root concept still matches the traditional root concept to a large extent. (But I admit that the situation is not a happy one, because it was actually Arabic and Hebrew grammarians who brought the "root" concept into linguistics; so maybe I should change the term to something different, such as "radix".)

In any event, whatever problems my root concept has, it does not have the fatal problem of incoherence, only the (fairly ubiquitous) vagueness problem. So I do have hopes that my definition of "affix" can stand (though Chao Li rightly points out that in my definition of “simple morphosyntactic word” as “a form that consists of (minimally) a root, plus any affixes”, “free” needs to be added before “form”).

Best,
Martin




On 12.11.17 21:22, Peter Arkadiev wrote:

Dear Martin, dear all,

 

the problem with "roots" as a comparative concept is that they are not well-defined either. In the 2012 paper which Martin has quoted, he defines "roots" as follows (p. 123 fn. 9): "morphs that denote things, actions, or properties"; thus, the definition of roots is based on the definition of "morph" , which in turn (ibid.) is defined as "smallest meaningful piece of form". This appears to sound OK, but the devil is in the details. Martin writes (p. 123) that "The great advantage is that we can readily identify roots in any language", but I consider this statement overly optimistic and based on the notion of "root" inferrable from such languages as English (though even there "sing-sang-sung-song" can posit problems). What about Semitic languages, where roots are abstract phonological entities with very little "substantive" meaning? If we take the most famous example from classical Arabic, what is the root of *kita:bun* 'book'? Is it the same root as in *kataba* 'he wrote' and *yaktubu* 'he writes' (and what is the common root, if any, of the latter two)? Is it a thing-denoting root or an action-denoting root? And please, be sure that, again, Arabic is just the extreme case. The very same problems with roots are found in plenty of other languages, including the most familiar ones.

 

Best regards,

 

Peter

 

-- 

Peter Arkadiev, PhD

Institute of Slavic Studies

Russian Academy of Sciences

Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119991 Moscow

peterarkadiev at yandex.ru

http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev

 

 

 

12.11.2017, 15:48, "Martin Haspelmath"  <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de> <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>:

Mattis List and Balthasar Bickel rightly emphasize that “word” is not a Platonic entity (a natural kind) that exists in advance of language learning or linguistic analysis – few linguists would disagree here, not even generativists (who otherwise liberally assume natural-kind catgeories).

 

But I think many linguists still ACT AS IF there were such a natural kind, because the “word” notion is a crucial ingredient to a number of other notions that linguists use routinely – e.g. “gender”, which is typically defined in terms of “agreement” (which is defined in terms of inflectional marking on targets; and inflection is defined in terms of “word”).

 

So is it possible to define a comparative concept ‘word’ that applies to all languages equally, and that accords reasonably with our stereotypes? Note that I didn’t deny this in my 2011 paper, I just said that nobody had come up with a satisfactory definition (that could be used, for instance, in defining “gender” or “polysynthesis”). So I’ll be happy to contribute to a discussion on how to make progress on defining “word”.

 

Larry Hyman notes that other notions like “syllable” and “sentence” are also problematic in that they also “leak”. However, I think it is important to distinguish two situations of “slipperiness”:

 

(1) “Leakage” of definitions due to vague defining notions

 

(2) Incoherence of definitions due to the use of different criteria in different languages

 

The first can be addressed by tightening the defining notions, but the second is fatal.

 

To take up Östen Dahl’s example of the “family” notion: In one culture, a family might be said to be a set of minimally three living people consisting of two adults (regardless of gender) living in a romantic relationship plus all their descendants. In another culture, a family might be defined as a married couple consisting of a man and a woman plus all their living direct ancestors, all their (great) uncles and (great) aunts, and all the descendants of all of these.

 

With two family concepts as different as these, it is obviously not very interesting to ask general cross-cultural questions about “families” (e.g. “How often do all family members have meals together?”). So the use of different criteria for different cultures is fatal here.

 

What I find worrying is that linguists often seem to accept incoherent definitions of comparative concepts (this was emphasized especially in my 2015 paper on defining vs. diagnosing categories). Different diagnostics in different languages would not be fatal if “word” were a Platonic (natural-kind) concept, but if we are not born with a “word” category, typologists need to use the SAME criteria for all languages.

 

So here’s a proposal for defining a notion of “simple morphosyntactic word”:

 

A simple morphosyntactic word is a form that consists of (minimally) a root, plus any affixes.

 

Here’s a proposal for defining a notion of “affix”, in such a way that the results do not go too much against our intuitions or stereotypes:

 

An affix is a bound form that always occurs together with a root of the same root-class and is never separated from the root by a free form or a non-affixal bound form.

 

These definitions make use of the notions of “root” and “root-class” (defined in Haspelmath 2012) and  “bound (form)” vs. “free (form)” (defined in Haspelmath 2013). All these show leakage as in (1) above, but they are equally applicable to all languages, so they are not incoherent. (I thank Harald Hammarström for a helpful discussion that helped me to come up with the above definitions, which I had not envisaged in 2011.)

 

(What I don’t know at the moment is how to relate “simple morphosyntactic word” to “morphosyntactic word” in general, because I cannot distinguish compounds from phrases comparatively; and I don’t know what to do with “phonological word”.)

 

Crucially, the definitions above make use of a number of basic concepts that apply to ALL languages in the SAME way. David Gil’s proposal, to measure “bond strength” by means of a range of language-particular phenomena, falls short of this requirement (as already hinted by Eitan Grossman). Note that the problem I have with David’s proposal is not that it provides no categorical contrasts (recall my acceptance of vagueness in (1) above), but that there is no way of telling which phenomena should count as measuring bond strength.

 

David’s approach resembles Keenan’s (1976) attempt at defining “subject” (perhaps not by accident, because Ed Keenan was David’s PhD supervisor), but I have a similar objection to Keenan: If different criteria are used for different languages, how do we know that we are measuring the same phenomenon across languages? Measuring X by means of Y makes sense only if we know independently that X and Y are very highly correlated. But do we know this, for subjects, or for bond strength?

 

Best,

Martin

 

  

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10     
D-07745 Jena  
&
Leipzig University 
IPF 141199
Nikolaistrasse 6-10
D-04109 Leipzig    
 
 
 
 
 

, 

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-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10  
D-07745 Jena  
&
Leipzig University 
IPF 141199
Nikolaistrasse 6-10
D-04109 Leipzig    
 
 
 
 
 


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