<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1"
http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
As far as I'm aware, only one typologist has taken up the challenge
of my 2011 paper: Matthew Dryer in his 2015 ALT talk at Albuquerque
(I have copied his abstract below, as it seems to be no longer
available from the UNM website).<br>
<br>
Otherwise, the reaction has generally been that this is old news
(for those with no stake in the syntax-morphology distinction), or
that the distinction is fuzzy, like almost all distinctions in
language. But the latter reaction misses the point that it's not
clear whether there are any cross-linguistic regularities to begin
with (apart from orthographic conventions) that point to the
cross-linguistic relevance of something like a "word" notion. (The
results of the recent work by Jim Blevins and colleagues do seem to
point in this direction, but it is only based on four European
languages.)<br>
<br>
An interesting case is OUP's recent handbook on polysynthesis: While
all definitions of polysynthesis make reference to the "word"
notion, almost none of the authors and editors try to justify it,
instead simply presupposing that there is such a thing as
polysynthesis.<br>
<br>
(The one paper that addresses the issue, by Bickel & Zúñiga,
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1">
agrees with my skepticism in that it finds that "polysynthetic
"words" are often not unified entities
<title>The word in polysynthetic languages</title>
defined by a single domain on which all criteria would converge".
OUP's handbook is hard to access, but a manuscript version of Bickel
& Zúñiga can be found here:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en/bickel/publications/in-press.html">http://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en/bickel/publications/in-press.html</a>)<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Martin<br>
<br>
***********************************<br>
<br>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1">
<div class="page" title="Page 43">
<div class="section" style="background-color: rgb(100.000000%,
100.000000%, 100.000000%)">
<div class="layoutArea">
<div class="column">
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-weight: 700">Evidence for the
suffixing preference
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">Matthew S. Dryer
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-style: italic">University at
Buffalo
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">Haspelmath (2011) argues that there
are no good criteria for distinguishing affixes from
separate words, so that claims that make reference to a
distinction between words and affixes are
suspect. He claims that there is therefore no good
evidence for the suffixing preference
(Greenberg 1957). since that assumes that one can
distinguish affixes from separate words. He
implies that decisions that linguists describing
languages make in terms of what they represent as
words may at best be based on inconsistent criteria and
he has suggested that we have no way of
knowing whether the apparent suffixing preference
reflects anything more than the fact that the
orthography of European languages far more often
represents grammatical morphemes as
suffixes than as prefixes.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">In this paper, I provide evidence
that the suffixing preference is unlikely to be an
artifact
of orthographic conventions, at least as it applies to
tense-aspect affixes. I examined the
phonological properties of tense-aspect affixes in a
sample of over 500 languages, distinguishing
two types on the basis of their phonological properties.
Type 1 affixes are either ones that are
nonsyllabic, consisting only of consonants, or ones that
exhibit allomorphy that is conditioned
phonologically by verb stems. Type 2 affixes are those
that exhibit neither of these two
properties. The reason that this distinction is relevant
is that grammatical morphemes of the first
sort are almost always represented as affixes rather
than as separate words in grammatical
descriptions, so that we can safely assume that in the
vast majority of cases, grammatical
morphemes of this sort that are represented as affixes
really are such. Haspelmath’s suggestion
that the suffixing preference might be an artifact of
orthographic conventions thus predicts that
we should not find a significant difference in the
relative frequency of Type 1 prefixes and
suffixes, but only with Type 2 prefixes and suffixes.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">The results of my study show that
this prediction is not confirmed. They show that for
both types of affixes, suffixes outnumber prefixes by a
little over 2.5 to 1. The number of
languages in my sample with Type 1 suffixes outnumber
the number of languages with Type 1
prefixes by 181 to 67, or around 2.7 to 1, while the
number of languages with only Type 2
suffixes outnumber the number of languages with only
Type 2 prefixes by 223 to 85,
approximately 2.6 to 1. Thus the prediction that the
suffixing preference should be found
primarily with Type 2 affixes, is not borne out. To the
contrary, we find the same suffixing
preference among both types of affixes.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">This provides evidence that, at
least for tense-aspect affixes, the suffixing preference
is
real and not an artifact of orthographic conventions.
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-weight: 700">References
</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">Haspelmath, Martin. 2011. The
indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of
morphology and syntax. </span><span style="font-size:
12.000000pt; font-family: 'TimesNewRomanPS'; font-style:
italic">Folia Linguistica </span><span
style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'TimesNewRomanPSMT'">45: 31-80.</span><span
style="font-size: 12.000000pt; font-family:
'LucidaGrande'">
</span></p>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<title>ALT Abstract Booklet</title>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 10.11.17 06:11, Adam J Tallman
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAK0T6OiJ0N9nLxLu80eXzCXy_Lb+ezEK2GuSJSbK99EHt+GZsA@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;
charset=ISO-8859-1">
<div dir="ltr">
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:rgb(76,17,48)">I
am writing a paper about wordhood - has anyone responded to
Haspelmath's 2011 <i>Folia Linguistica</i> paper on the
topic?<br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:rgb(76,17,48)"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:rgb(76,17,48)">I
have only found two sources that mention the paper and seem to
put forward an argument against its conclusions, but its
mostly in <i>en passant </i>fashion.</div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:rgb(76,17,48)"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:rgb(76,17,48)">On
is Blevins (2016) <i>Word and Paradigm Morphology </i>and
another is <span
style="color:rgb(102,102,102);font-family:arial,verdana,tahoma,georgia,"trebuchet
ms";font-size:12px">Geertzen, Jeroen, James P. Blevins
& Petar Milin. ‘Informativeness of unit boundaries’ [</span><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/jpb39/pdf/GeertzenBlevinsMilin2016.pdf"
style="text-decoration-line:none;color:rgb(0,152,153);font-family:arial,verdana,tahoma,georgia,"trebuchet
ms";font-size:12px">pdf</a><span
style="color:rgb(102,102,102);font-family:arial,verdana,tahoma,georgia,"trebuchet
ms";font-size:12px">]. </span><cite
style="color:rgb(102,102,102);font-family:arial,verdana,tahoma,georgia,"trebuchet
ms";font-size:12px">Italian Journal of Linguistics</cite><span
style="color:rgb(102,102,102);font-family:arial,verdana,tahoma,georgia,"trebuchet
ms";font-size:12px"> </span><strong
style="color:rgb(102,102,102);font-family:arial,verdana,tahoma,georgia,"trebuchet
ms";font-size:12px">28</strong><span
style="color:rgb(102,102,102);font-family:arial,verdana,tahoma,georgia,"trebuchet
ms";font-size:12px">(2), 1–24.</span></div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:rgb(76,17,48)"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:rgb(76,17,48)">Any
correspondence in this regard would be greatly appreciated,</div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:rgb(76,17,48)"><br>
</div>
<div class="gmail_default"
style="font-family:monospace,monospace;color:rgb(76,17,48)">Adam </div>
<div><br>
</div>
-- <br>
<div class="gmail_signature">
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div dir="ltr">
<div>
<div dir="ltr"><font face="monospace, monospace">Adam
J.R. Tallman</font>
<div><font face="monospace, monospace">Investigador
del Museo de Etnografía y Folklore, la Paz<br>
</font>
<div><font face="monospace, monospace">PhD
candidate, University of Texas at Austin</font></div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<fieldset class="mimeAttachmentHeader"></fieldset>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>)
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
</pre>
</body>
</html>