<div dir="ltr"><p class="MsoNormal"><a name="m_126158870099047691__GoBack"></a><span lang="EN-US">Dear Colleagues,<span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Martin’s paper and the discussions on the
list are all thought-provoking. I would like to share a few thoughts from the
perspective of Mandarin. As Mandarin does not use any space to separate words
in writing (unless one uses pinyin or some other romanization system), the
notion “word” is not as intuitive as it is to English speakers, for example. As
the Chinese writing system centers around characters, earlier linguistic
studies of the Chinese language written in Chinese, to a large extent, also
centered around the discussion of characters. In fact, “word”, as a linguistic term,
was not introduced into Chinese until the early 20<sup>th</sup> century
(although there were discussions of Chinese words in writings published in
other languages than Chinese, e.g. in Georg van der Gabelentz’s <i>Chinesische Grammatik</i> published in
1881). <span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">While the notion of word is not as intuitive
to Chinese speakers as it is to English speakers, Chinese speakers still have a
lot of agreement as to what can be considered a word (thanks to Paolo for his
quote of Saussure, particularly the insight about the word as “</span><span lang="EN-US" style="color:black;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial">a unity that is evident for the mind, something
pivotal in the language mechanism</span><span lang="EN-US">”.) For
example, there is little or no disagreement as to the status of </span><i><span style="font-family:宋体">中国</span>
<span lang="EN-US">Zhōngguó</span></i><span lang="EN-US"> ‘China’ as a word in
Chinese. On the issue of word segmentation in Chinese, Sproat et al. (1996) [“A
stochastic finite-state word-segmentation algorithm for Chinese”] report that
native speakers of Chinese have about 75% agreement as to word segmentation. The
result was achieved by their simply instructing the subjects to “mark all
places they might plausibly pause if they were reading the text aloud” (p.393).
As Martin points out in his paper, the reliance on prosodic pause to segment
words can be problematic. It would be interesting to know whether the result will
be better if clearer and more informative instructions are given. Clearer and
more informative instructions require a clear and reasonable definition of
word. In this respect, I fully agree with Eitan and Martin about the importance
of having such a definition. (With respect to Martin’s definition of “a simple
morphosyntactic word” as “a form that consists of (minimally) a root, plus any
affixes”, I wonder whether “free” needs to be added before “form”.) <span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Best regards,<span></span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US">Chao<span></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-US"><br></span></p><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 3:17 PM, Paolo Ramat <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:paoram@unipv.it" target="_blank">paoram@unipv.it</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div dir="ltr">
<div dir="ltr">
<div style="FONT-SIZE:12pt;FONT-FAMILY:'Calibri';COLOR:#000000">
<div>May I quote Saussure’s words concerning ‘wordhood’ which I cited in my
speech held at the Conference on Word-Formation Theories’, II (Košice,
June 2015) ? [published in SKASE - JOURNAL OF THEORETICAL LINGUISTICS,
2016, No. 2 Special Number: Selected papers from the Word-Formation Theories
conference] : <em>Cours de linguistique générale</em> (p. 154): le mot,
malgré la difficulté qu’on a à le définir, est une unité qui s’impose à
l’esprit, quelque chose de central dans le mécanisme de la langue<em> </em>[the
word, in spite of the difficulties of its definition, is a unity that is evident
for the mind, something pivotal in the language mechanism].</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Endnote 1: </div>
<div>Immediately after the sentence quoted in the text Saussure adds the
following comment: “mais c’est là un sujet qui remplirait à lui seul un volume”
[but this is a matter which could ‘per se’ fill up a whole book]. In fact, in
the <em>Notes personnelles</em>, which Saussure never published and have been
published by Simon Bouquet as<em> Écrits de linguistique générale</em>,
Gallimard, Paris 2002, we read (p. 24) under the title ‘Linguistique et
phonétique’: “... il m'est impossible de voir que le mot, au milieu de tous les
usages qu'on en fait, soit quelque chose de donné, et qui s'impose à moi comme
la perception d'une couleur. Le fait est que, tant que l'on parle du mot
<em>a</em>, du mot<em> b</em>, on reste fondamentalement dans le donné
MORPHOLOGIQUE, en dépit de tous les points de vue qu'on prétend introduire,
parce que le mot est <em>une distinction qui relève de l’ordre d’idées
morphologiques</em> [my italics : P.R.]” […it is impossible to see in the word,
midst of the many uses we do of it, something as given and naturally
self-imposing like colour perception. The fact is that as long as we speak of
the word<em> a</em> or <em>b</em> we basically stick at the MORPHOLOGICAL side,
in spite of the many viewpoints we pretend to introduce, since the word is a
distinction that comes from the morphological domain].</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Best,</div>
<div>Paolo</div>
<div> </div>
<div style="FONT-SIZE:12pt;FONT-FAMILY:'Calibri';COLOR:#000000">Prof.Paolo
Ramat<br>Editor-in-Chief of the “Archivio Glottologico Italiano”<br>Università
di Pavia (retired)<br>Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS Pavia,
retired)<br>Societas Linguist. Europ., Honorary Member<br><br>Piazzetta Arduino
11<br>I – 27100 Pavia<br>##39 347 044 98 44 (port.)<br>##39 0382 27 0 27
(home)</div>
<div style="FONT-SIZE:small;TEXT-DECORATION:none;FONT-FAMILY:"Calibri";FONT-WEIGHT:normal;COLOR:#000000;FONT-STYLE:normal;DISPLAY:inline">
<div style="FONT:10pt tahoma">
<div> </div>
<div style="BACKGROUND:#f5f5f5">
<div><b>From:</b> <a title="TammA@ceu.edu" href="mailto:TammA@ceu.edu" target="_blank">Anne Tamm</a> </div>
<div><b>Sent:</b> Saturday, November 11, 2017 9:25 PM</div><div><div class="m_126158870099047691h5">
<div><b>To:</b> <a title="lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.<wbr>org</a>
</div>
<div><b>Subject:</b> Re: [Lingtyp] wordhood: responses to
Haspelmath</div></div></div></div></div>
<div> </div></div>
<div style="FONT-SIZE:small;TEXT-DECORATION:none;FONT-FAMILY:"Calibri";FONT-WEIGHT:normal;COLOR:#000000;FONT-STYLE:normal;DISPLAY:inline"><div><div class="m_126158870099047691h5">
<div id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450divtagdefaultwrapper" style="FONT-SIZE:12pt;FONT-FAMILY:calibri,helvetica,sans-serif;COLOR:#000000" dir="ltr">
<div id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450divtagdefaultwrapper" style="FONT-SIZE:12pt;FONT-FAMILY:calibri,helvetica,sans-serif,helvetica,emojifont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",notocoloremoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",emojisymbols;COLOR:rgb(0,0,0)" dir="ltr">
<h3 style="FONT-SIZE:18px;BORDER-TOP:0px;FONT-FAMILY:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;BORDER-RIGHT:0px;BORDER-BOTTOM:0px;COLOR:rgb(112,130,16);PADDING-BOTTOM:6px;PADDING-TOP:12px;PADDING-LEFT:0px;MARGIN:0px;BORDER-LEFT:0px;PADDING-RIGHT:0px;BACKGROUND-COLOR:rgb(37,44,35)">Dear
all,</h3>
<div>
<div style="FONT-SIZE:16px;FONT-FAMILY:calibri,helvetica,sans-serif,helvetica,emojifont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",notocoloremoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",emojisymbols">Honestly,
I cannot see why an essentialist approach to wordhood would contradict a
typological, cross-linguistically valid approach to wordhood. This just shows
how different our backgrounds are...</div>
<div style="FONT-SIZE:16px;FONT-FAMILY:calibri,helvetica,sans-serif,helvetica,emojifont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",notocoloremoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",emojisymbols">This
discussion sounds just perfect for the Morphology Meeting in Budapest next May
(the deadline is tomorrow), or as a workshop for the next SLE in Tallinn. </div>
<div style="FONT-SIZE:16px;FONT-FAMILY:calibri,helvetica,sans-serif,helvetica,emojifont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",notocoloremoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",emojisymbols">Best,</div>
<div style="FONT-SIZE:16px;FONT-FAMILY:calibri,helvetica,sans-serif,helvetica,emojifont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",notocoloremoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",emojisymbols">Anne</div></div>
<div>
<p style="FONT-SIZE:12pt;FONT-FAMILY:calibri;MARGIN:0in 0in 0pt"><a id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450LPlnk404646" title="http://www.nytud.hu/imm18
Cmd+Click or tap to follow the link" class="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450OWAAutoLink" href="http://www.nytud.hu/imm18" target="_blank">http://www.nytud.hu/imm18</a></p>
<div id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450LPBorder_GT_15104314733870.818348082874877" style="OVERFLOW:auto;MARGIN-BOTTOM:20px;WIDTH:100%;TEXT-INDENT:0px">
<table id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450LPContainer_15104314733830.4357744313024374" style="OVERFLOW:auto;BORDER-TOP:rgb(200,200,200) 1px dotted;WIDTH:90%;BORDER-BOTTOM:rgb(200,200,200) 1px dotted;COLOR:rgb(0,0,0);PADDING-BOTTOM:20px;PADDING-TOP:20px;MARGIN-TOP:20px;BACKGROUND-COLOR:rgb(255,255,255)" cellspacing="0">
<tbody>
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<td id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450TextCell_15104314733850.337081467469466" style="VERTICAL-ALIGN:top;PADDING-BOTTOM:0px;PADDING-TOP:0px;PADDING-LEFT:0px;DISPLAY:table-cell;PADDING-RIGHT:0px" colspan="2">
<div id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450LPRemovePreviewContainer_15104314733850.2846408351332832"></div>
<div id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450LPTitle_15104314733850.7617618209455159" style="FONT-SIZE:21px;FONT-FAMILY:wf_segoe-ui_light,"Segoe UI Light","Segoe WP Light","Segoe UI","Segoe WP",tahoma,arial,sans-serif;FONT-WEIGHT:normal;COLOR:rgb(0,152,195);LINE-HEIGHT:21px"><a id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450LPUrlAnchor_15104314733860.03179096423957195" style="TEXT-DECORATION:none" href="http://www.nytud.hu/imm18" target="_blank">18th International Morphology Meeting - nytud.hu</a></div>
<div id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450LPMetadata_15104314733860.33825993061314374" style="FONT-SIZE:14px;FONT-FAMILY:wf_segoe-ui_normal,"Segoe UI","Segoe WP",tahoma,arial,sans-serif;FONT-WEIGHT:normal;COLOR:rgb(102,102,102);MARGIN:10px 0px 16px;LINE-HEIGHT:14px"><a href="http://www.nytud.hu" target="_blank">www.nytud.hu</a></div>
<div id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450LPDescription_15104314733870.8122264731819424" style="OVERFLOW:hidden;FONT-SIZE:14px;FONT-FAMILY:wf_segoe-ui_normal,"Segoe UI","Segoe WP",tahoma,arial,sans-serif;FONT-WEIGHT:normal;COLOR:rgb(102,102,102);DISPLAY:block;LINE-HEIGHT:20px;MAX-HEIGHT:100px">IMM18
Home. The 18th International Morphology Meeting is organized by the
Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of
Sciences.</div></td></tr></tbody></table></div>
<p style="FONT-SIZE:12pt;FONT-FAMILY:calibri;MARGIN:0in 0in 0pt"> </p></div>
<h3 style="FONT-SIZE:18px;BORDER-TOP:0px;FONT-FAMILY:arial,helvetica,sans-serif;BORDER-RIGHT:0px;BORDER-BOTTOM:0px;COLOR:rgb(112,130,16);PADDING-BOTTOM:6px;PADDING-TOP:12px;PADDING-LEFT:0px;MARGIN:0px;BORDER-LEFT:0px;PADDING-RIGHT:0px;BACKGROUND-COLOR:rgb(37,44,35)"><a id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450LPlnk551085" class="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450OWAAutoLink" style="FONT-SIZE:12pt;FONT-FAMILY:calibri,helvetica,sans-serif,helvetica,emojifont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",notocoloremoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",emojisymbols;BACKGROUND-COLOR:rgb(255,255,255)" href="https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=imm18" target="_blank">https://www.easychair.org/conf<wbr>erences/?conf=imm18</a><br></h3></div>
<div id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450divtagdefaultwrapper" style="FONT-SIZE:12pt;FONT-FAMILY:calibri,helvetica,sans-serif,helvetica,emojifont,"Apple Color Emoji","Segoe UI Emoji",notocoloremoji,"Segoe UI Symbol","Android Emoji",emojisymbols;COLOR:rgb(0,0,0)" dir="ltr">
<div> </div>
<div style="COLOR:rgb(0,0,0)">
<hr style="WIDTH:98%;DISPLAY:inline-block">
<div id="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450divRplyFwdMsg" dir="ltr"><font style="FONT-SIZE:11pt" color="#000000" face="Calibri, sans-serif"><b>From:</b> Lingtyp
<<a href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp-bounces@listserv.ling<wbr>uistlist.org</a>> on behalf of William Croft
<<a href="mailto:wcroft@unm.edu" target="_blank">wcroft@unm.edu</a>><br><b>Sent:</b> Saturday, November 11, 2017 8:25
PM<br><b>To:</b> <a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.<wbr>org</a><br><b>Subject:</b> Re:
[Lingtyp] wordhood: responses to Haspelmath</font>
<div> </div></div>
<div class="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450BodyFragment"><font size="2"><span style="FONT-SIZE:10pt">
<div class="m_126158870099047691m_3040931366235856450PlainText">I am not arguing for an extreme position like writing
grammars without word boundaries either. I am just trying to bring to people’s
attention that wordhood is problematic, and to persuade someone to look at
wordhood without presupposing an essentialist concept of ‘word’, that would get
us past appealing to intuitions which are actually rather unclear on closer
inspection. There might be a common core, i.e. a set of crosslinguistically
valid criteria which form universal patterns like a typological prototype (as
the latter is defined in my “Typology and Universals” textbook). But I don’t
know what the criteria are or what their typological relationships are. I would
really like to know.<br><br>Actually, I *don’t* know what a family is, in a
cross-cultural sense, and even in my own culture, given the notions of
immediate, nuclear and extended family, foster children, adoption, divorce etc.
I don’t even know if ‘family’ makes sense cross-culturally, given the variety of
kin systems and the organization of society they reflect.
<br><br>Bill<br><br>> On Nov 11, 2017, at 12:16 PM, Östen Dahl
<<a href="mailto:oesten@ling.su.se" target="_blank">oesten@ling.su.se</a>> wrote:<br>> <br>> I am sorry if I gave the
impression that I'm arguing for an extreme position (such as writing grammars
without word boundaries). I'm rather trying to see what the ultimate
consequences are of Martin's proposals. But what I am wondering about is whether
there isn't a common core to the language-specific concepts of "word", although
it need not involve precise criteria. I think "word" may be a concept rather
much like "family". Consider Wikipedia's definition of "family", which hardly
provides any criteria that can be used to identify families
cross-culturally:<br>> <br>> "In the context of human society, a family
(from Latin: familia) is a group of people affiliated either by consanguinity
(by recognized birth), affinity (by marriage or other relationship), or
co-residence (as implied by the etymology of the English word "family"[1]) or
some combination of these. Members of the immediate family may include spouses,
parents, brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters. Members of the extended family
may include grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, nieces, and
siblings-in-law. Sometimes these are also considered members of the immediate
family, depending on an individual's specific relationship with them."<br>>
<br>> Still, we think we know what a family is.<br>> <br>> Östen
<br>> <br>> <br>> -----Ursprungligt meddelande-----<br>> Från:
Lingtyp [<a href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listse<wbr>rv.linguistlist.org</a>]
För William Croft<br>> Skickat: den 11 november 2017 20:06<br>> Till:
<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.<wbr>org</a><br>> Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] wordhood:
responses to Haspelmath<br>> <br>> The problem that we need to guard
against is using language-specific definitions for a supposedly crosslinguistic
(comparative) concept of ‘word’. One has to use a crosslinguistically valid
criterion for wordhood, and apply the same criterion across languages. I have
yet to see anyone do this.<br>> <br>> As usual, the problem is the belief
in which linguistic units have essences like ’noun, ‘verb’, ‘word’ etc., and all
we linguists need to do is “discover” this essence through some accidental
linguistic fact of a particular language (using ‘essence’ and ‘accident’ in the
philosophical sense); and it doesn’t matter if the facts are different from one
language to the next, or are defined in a way that works only for that language.
Until, of course, someone else comes along and decides that the essence is
different from what the first person thought, even by looking at the same
accidental facts; or maybe that they don’t even believe in the essence.<br>>
<br>> The solution, in my opinion, is to look at the “accidental" facts, that
is, the different criteria for wordhood (defined in a crosslinguistically valid
fashion), and find out what the typological universals are that govern those
facts. I would expect that (a) the criteria won’t match, within or across
languages, as with parts of speech etc.; but (b) the criteria would pattern
typologically in such a way that most of the morpheme strings that we would
intuitively call “words” would have a fairly high degree of syntagmatic unity
most of the time. (Yes, “morpheme” raises some of the same issues -- but if we
don’t address these issues, we can’t really trust our results.)<br>> <br>>
Bill<br>> <br>>> On Nov 11, 2017, at 11:47 AM, Edith A Moravcsik
<<a href="mailto:edith@uwm.edu" target="_blank">edith@uwm.edu</a>> wrote:<br>>> <br>>> I agree with Fritz (if I
interpret his message correctly). As far as I can see, we can work with
any definition of "word" in crosslinguistic research and then see if that
definition is useful or not - i.e., whether it does or does not yield
typological correlates. If we try this approach, I cannot see that we
could go wrong; or is there any possible problem that we need to guard against?
<br>>> <br>>> Edith Moravcsik<br>>> <br>>> -----Original
Message-----<br>>> From: Lingtyp [<a href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listse<wbr>rv.linguistlist.org</a>]
On <br>>> Behalf Of Frederick J Newmeyer<br>>> Sent: Saturday,
November 11, 2017 11:04 AM<br>>> To: Martin Haspelmath
<<a href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>><br>>> Cc:
<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank">lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.<wbr>org</a><br>>> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] wordhood:
responses to Haspelmath<br>>> <br>>> Let's say that there are no
rigid consistent criteria that distinguish words, prefixes, and suffixes. I
don't see why that would necessarily prevent us from making valid
generalizations about prefixes and suffixes. Consider an analogy. We can make
valid generalizations about men and women (their preferences for whatever, their
likelihood to do whatever, etc.) even though gender is to a certain extent
fluid. There are adults who consider themselves neither male or female and
others who consider themselves both. Different criteria lead to different
assignments for being a man or for being a woman. It seems like an analogous
issue would come up for virtually any 'natural' category. What is the essential
problem here?<br>>> <br>>> --fritz<br>>> <br>>>
<br>>> Frederick J. Newmeyer<br>>> Professor Emeritus, University of
Washington Adjunct Professor, U of <br>>> British Columbia and Simon
Fraser U<br>>> <br>>> On Sat, 11 Nov 2017, Martin Haspelmath
wrote:<br>>> <br>>>> As far as I'm aware, only one typologist has
taken up the challenge <br>>>> 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
<br>>>> those with no stake in the syntax-morphology distinction), or
that <br>>>> the distinction is fuzzy, like almost all distinctions in
language. <br>>>> But the latter reaction misses the point that it's
not clear whether <br>>>> there are any cross-linguistic regularities
to begin with (apart from <br>>>> orthographic conventions) that point
to the cross-linguistic <br>>>> relevance of something like a "word"
notion. (The results of the <br>>>> recent work by Jim Blevins and
colleagues do seem to point in this <br>>>> direction, but it is only
based on four European languages.)<br>>>> <br>>>> An
interesting case is OUP's recent handbook on polysynthesis: While
<br>>>> 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, agrees <br>>>> with my skepticism in that it finds that
"polysynthetic "words" are often not unified entities 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:<br>>>> <a href="http://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en/bickel/publications/in-pr" target="_blank">http://www.comparativelinguist<wbr>ics.uzh.ch/en/bickel/<wbr>publications/in-pr</a><br>>>>
e<br>>>> ss.html)<br>>>> <br>>>>
Best,<br>>>> Martin<br>>>> <br>>>>
******************************<wbr>*****<br>>>> <br>>>> Evidence
for the suffixing preference<br>>>> <br>>>> Matthew S.
Dryer<br>>>> <br>>>> University at Buffalo<br>>>>
<br>>>> Haspelmath (2011) argues that there are no good criteria for
<br>>>> distinguishing affixes from separate words, so that claims that
make <br>>>> reference to a distinction between words and affixes are
suspect. He <br>>>> claims that there is therefore no good evidence for
the suffixing <br>>>> 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.<br>>>> <br>>>> 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.<br>>>> 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.<br>>>> Type 1 affixes are either ones that are nonsyllabic,
consisting only <br>>>> of consonants, or ones that exhibit allomorphy
that is conditioned <br>>>> phonologically by verb stems.
Type<br>>>> 2 affixes are those that exhibit neither of these two
properties. The <br>>>> reason that this distinction is relevant is
that grammatical <br>>>> morphemes of the first sort are almost always
represented as affixes <br>>>> rather than as separate words in
grammatical descriptions, so that we <br>>>> 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.<br>>>> <br>>>> The results of my study show that
this prediction is not confirmed. <br>>>> They show that for both types
of affixes, suffixes outnumber prefixes <br>>>> by a little over 2.5 to
1. The number of languages in my sample with <br>>>> 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.<br>>>>
<br>>>> This provides evidence that, at least for tense-aspect affixes,
the suffixing preference is real and not an artifact of orthographic
conventions.<br>>>> <br>>>> References<br>>>>
<br>>>> Haspelmath, Martin. 2011. The indeterminacy of word
segmentation and <br>>>> the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia
Linguistica 45: 31-80.><br>>>> <br>>>> On 10.11.17 06:11,
Adam J Tallman wrote:<br>>>> I am writing a
paper about wordhood - has anyone responded to Haspelmath's 2011 Folia
Linguistica paper on the topic?<br>>>> <br>>>> I have only
found two sources that mention the paper and seem to put forward an argument
against its conclusions, but its mostly in en passant fashion.<br>>>>
<br>>>> On is Blevins (2016) Word and Paradigm Morphology and another
is Geertzen, Jeroen, James P. Blevins & Petar Milin. ‘Informativeness of
unit boundaries’<br>>>> [pdf]. Italian Journal of Linguistics 28(2),
1–24.<br>>>> <br>>>> Any correspondence in this regard would
be greatly appreciated,<br>>>> <br>>>> Adam<br>>>>
<br>>>> --<br>>>> Adam J.R. Tallman Investigador del Museo de
Etnografía y Folklore, la <br>>>> Paz PhD candidate, University of
Texas at Austin<br>>>> <br>>>> <br>>>>
<br>>>> --<br>>>> Martin Haspelmath (<a href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>)
Max Planck Institute for <br>>>> the Science of Human
History<br>>>> Kahlaische Strasse
10 <br>>>> D-07745
Jena<br>>>> &<br>>>> Leipzig University<br>>>>
IPF 141199<br>>>> Nikolaistrasse 6-10<br>>>> D-04109
Leipzig <br>>>> <br>>>> <br>>>>
<br>>>> <br>>>> <br>>>> <br>>>> <br>>>
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