[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Fri Nov 26 11:14:37 UTC 2021

dear Ian,

Thanks for an interesting question.
Oceanic languages often colexify “word” with “speech” (sometimes also
“story”), and/or “language, dialect”.
This is the case, for example, of Mwotlap [Vanuatu] (see entries *no-hohole*
<https://marama.huma-num.fr/Lex/Mwotlap/h.htm#%E2%93%94hohole%E2%93%96B>,
*na-vap*
<https://marama.huma-num.fr/Lex/Mwotlap/v.htm#%E2%93%94vap%E2%93%96B> —
both nominalized from a verb 'talk' or 'say').

*Teanu*, an Oceanic language of the Solomons, also can express those
meanings with its noun *piene
<https://dictionaria.clld.org/units/teanu-piene_1>*  (<verb *puie* 'talk').
But in addition, it has a compound *vese-piene
<https://dictionaria.clld.org/units/teanu-vesepiene_1>*, literally
“bit.of-speech”, which means “word”.

Then you ask an intriguing question:  what exactly would be the boundaries
of "words" (*vesepiene*) that native speakers would spontaneously segment
their sentences into?  I haven't done a formal experiment on this;  but
when Teanu speakers write in their language (over email, Facebook,
Messenger), even though their language is absent from any formal teaching
in schools, I do notice that they segment sentences into words in ways that
are consistent with each other, and consistent with the way I would have
done the segmentation myself.  In this respect, Teanu contrasts with other
Oceanic languages with many affixes and clitics, whose speakers show more
variation when it comes to segmenting clauses into words.

A Whorfian linguist might suggest that Teanu illustrates a correlation
between
(1) the relative ease of segmenting speech into words in this particular
language;
(2) the existence of a dedicated lexeme for “word”.
But I'm not sure this correlation would be verified in all languages.

best
Alex
------------------------------

Alex François
LaTTiCe <http://www.lattice.cnrs.fr/en/alexandre-francois/> — CNRS–
<http://www.cnrs.fr/index.html>ENS
<https://www.ens.fr/laboratoire/lattice-langues-textes-traitements-informatiques-et-cognition-umr-8094>
–Sorbonne nouvelle
<http://www.univ-paris3.fr/lattice-langues-textes-traitements-informatiques-cognition-umr-8094-3458.kjsp>
Australian National University
<https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/francois-a>
Personal homepage <http://alex.francois.online.fr/> – Academia.edu
<https://cnrs.academia.edu/AlexFran%C3%A7ois>
_________________________________________

On Fri, 26 Nov 2021 at 10:17, JOO, Ian [Student] <ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk>
wrote:

> Dear Martin,
>
> Thanks for citing this chapter.
> I did some quick search to see if it’s true that “only some” languages
> have a word for “word”.
> For example, in the World Loanword Database, it seems that most of the 41
> sample languages have a word for “word”, and more than half of them have a
> native word for it.
> https://wold.clld.org/meaning/18-26#2/32.2/-4.8
> Also in the CLICS3 database, many languages seem to have one or more
> “word”-words, although I can’t be sure if they are native or not.
> https://clics.clld.org/parameters/1599
> On the other hand, my native language, Korean, doesn’t have a
> monomorphemic “word”-word. The common words for “word”, tan-e and nath-mal,
> are both compounds (‘piece-speech’), and I suspect them to be fairly
> recently coined or borrowed.
> But the real question would be whether all these words for “word”
> designate roughly the same concept.
> In many languages, the word for “word” seems to be co-lexified with
> “speech” (such as Latin *verbum* or Japanese *koto-ba*).
> The question would be, when one asks a speaker of a given language to
> divide a sentence into words, would the number of words be consistent
> throughout different speakers?
> It would be an interesting experiment. I’d be happy to be informed of any
> previous study who conducted such an experiment.
>
> Regards,
> Ian
> On 26 Nov 2021, 2:56 PM +0800, Martin Haspelmath <
> martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>, wrote:
>
> I felt that Dixon & Aikhenvald's (2002) introductory chapter was very
> interesting:
>
> Dixon, R. M. W & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2002. Word: A typological
> framework. In Dixon, R. M.W & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (eds.), *Word: A
> cross-linguistic typology*, 1–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
>
> Thy say (p. 2-3) that "it appears that only some languages actually have a
> lexeme with the meaning ‘word’... The vast majority of languages spoken by
> small tribal groups (with from a few hundred to a few thousand speakers)
> have a lexeme meaning ‘(proper) name’ but none have the meaning ‘word’."
>
> Even Latin does not have a single word for 'word' (there is *verbum*,
> *vox*, *sermo*, and *dictio*, the latter a technical calque from Greek
> *léxis*).
>
> (Dixon & Aikhenvald's 2002 paper was a major inspiration for my 2011 paper
> on the indeterminacy of word segmentation.)
>
> Martin
>
> Am 26.11.21 um 07:16 schrieb JOO, Ian [Student]:
>
> Dear typologists,
>
> As you may know already, the concept of “word” is notoriously hard to
> define.
> Without getting into that, is the concept of wordhood attested
> cross-linguistically?
> In other words, do people with different language backgrounds believe that
> there is such a thing as a “word”, and do what people perceive as a “word”
> tend to be roughly the same concept?
> Which boils down to two questions:
>
>    1. Do many languages have a native, monomorphemic word for “word”?
>    2. If so, do these words for “word” refer to roughly the same (or, at
>    least, similar) concept?
>
> I would like to examine whether wordhood is a psychological reality shared
> by speakers of different languages.
>
> Regards,
> Ian
>
>
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> --
> Martin Haspelmath
> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
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