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Yes, Peter Arkadiev is quite right to point out that the root
concept as tentatively defined by me earlier (in <a
href="http://phonetics.linguistics.ucla.edu/wpl/issues/wpl17/wpl17.html">2012</a>)
does not extend readily to cases like English "sing/sang", let alone
Arabic "kataba/yaktubu".<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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" (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://wals.info/chapter/s5">http://wals.info/chapter/s5</a>),
they say:<br>
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"... This makes it impossible to typologize whole languages for
fusion and exponence. In response to this, we sampled individual
formatives..."<br>
<br>
A similar point was made by Bill Croft in his 2016 <a
href="https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity.2016.20.issue-2/">LT
contribution</a> on comparative concepts (§5):<br>
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"... “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."<br>
<br>
Likewise, Matthew Dryer points out in the current discussion that
comparative concepts need to be narrower than descriptive
categories:<br>
<br>
<small><small><span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Calibri;
mso-bidi-font-family:Calibri">"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</span></small></small>"<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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".)<br>
<br>
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 <span
lang="EN-US">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”)</span>.<br>
<br>
Best,<br>
Martin<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 12.11.17 21:22, Peter Arkadiev
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote cite="mid:3720191510518175@web43j.yandex.ru" type="cite">
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<div>Dear Martin, dear all,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>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.</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Best regards,</div>
<div> </div>
<div>Peter</div>
<div> </div>
<div>-- </div>
<div>Peter Arkadiev, PhD</div>
<div>Institute of Slavic Studies</div>
<div>Russian Academy of Sciences</div>
<div>Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119991 Moscow</div>
<div><a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:peterarkadiev@yandex.ru">peterarkadiev@yandex.ru</a></div>
<div><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev">http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev</a></div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div> </div>
<div>12.11.2017, 15:48, "Martin Haspelmath"
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de"><haspelmath@shh.mpg.de></a>:</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
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<p>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).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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”).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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”.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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”:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>(1) “Leakage” of definitions due to vague defining notions</p>
<p> </p>
<p>(2) Incoherence of definitions due to the use of different
criteria in different languages</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The first can be addressed by tightening the defining
notions, but the second is fatal.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>So here’s a proposal for defining a notion of “simple
morphosyntactic word”:</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>A simple morphosyntactic word is a form that consists of
(minimally) a root, plus any affixes.</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>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:</p>
<p> </p>
<p><b>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.</b></p>
<p> </p>
<p>These definitions make use of the notions of “root” and
“root-class” (defined in Haspelmath 2012) and<span> </span>“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.)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>(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”.)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>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?</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Best,</p>
<p>Martin</p>
<p> </p>
<pre>--
Martin Haspelmath (<a moz-do-not-send="true" 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
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<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
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