<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class=""><div class="">Dear Volker,</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""> I think most typologists are aware that (i) defining categories for coding is very hard, especially across languages -- hence all the discussions about comparative concepts on Lingtyp (some of which have subsequently been published in some form in Linguistic Typology), of which this discussion of ‘word’ is only the latest; and (ii) that typologists must usually operationalize those criteria and make the operationalizations as explicit as possible. I think that (i) and (ii) are fairly common practice in typology, despite my previous comments about essentialism and methodological opportunism (cherry-picking of criteria).</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""> On the other hand, your point about mono-annotator annotation is well taken. Nevertheless, the operational factor is this one:</div><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class=""><p class="">And I'm not saying that mono-annotator projects are useless, sometimes you just don't have the manpower for multi-annotator projects </p></div></blockquote><div> I have recently been working on computational projects that involve annotation, and even there, where there is a lot more large-scale funding than in typology, it is very expensive to hire and train annotators, and in the end there are maybe two annotators and a third person acting as adjudicator for a pilot annotation at most. (In fact, most of the effort in computational linguistics is towards training classifiers to do the annotation automatically on large corpora, and in my small experience those are often worse than mono-annotator annotations.)</div><div><br class=""></div><div> In typology, there is virtually no funding for any sort of multi-annotator annotation whatsoever. This is especially true for graduate students doing typological dissertations, but also for faculty doing typological research. I would guess that many typologists are aware that multi-annotator annotation is preferable, but impractical. But we don’t normally add a statement like “We are aware that engaging multiple annotators would improve the reliability of our coding and hence of the results of our crosslinguistic study; but due to lack of funding, all annotation of the data was performed by the author.” Perhaps we typologists should starting adding such statements.</div><div><br class=""></div><div>Best wishes,</div><div>Bill</div><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Nov 18, 2017, at 6:32 AM, Volker Gast <<a href="mailto:volker.gast@uni-jena.de" class="">volker.gast@uni-jena.de</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class="">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" class="">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class=""><p class=""><br class="">
</p><p class="">Hi Johanna, even if I could do this diplomatically, I wouldn't,
and I think it wouldn't make much sense, as my point is not about
specific publications or authors; it's about common practice (and
common practice is reflected in the publications of 'major
authorities'). But I think I get your point; so let me be a bit
more specific.</p><p class="">A lot of (quantitative) typological work relies on 'coding':
Information is extracted from grammars and transformed into a data
matrix. Now, it is common practice (and I'm not excluding myself
here) for the coding to be done by the analyst him/herself, and by
no one else. But that's considered bad practice in other fields.
Ideally, you'd need a team of annotators coding independently, on
the basis of annotation guidelines. The team codes a sample,
determines inter-annotator agreement, and adjusts/specifies the
annotation guidelines where necessary. This is done until the
inter-annotator agreement is satisfactory. And then you can start
with the actual coding. Ideally, the analyst shouldn't be involved
in the coding process, as her annotation decisions might be
(subconsciously) influenced by her working hypotheses. (Note that
this might be a viable solution to the question of how comparative
concepts can reliably be defined, for a given study; you can just
measure how much inter-annotator variation there is; whether or
not the operationalizations make sense is a different question, of
course, one of validity. When you use a set of criteria
disjunctively, the question is what exactly your
operationalizations are intended to represent.)<br class="">
</p><p class="">Note that I'm not saying that there are no multi-annotator
projects in typology (I'm actually involved in two such projects,
though one of them is actually a comparative corpus linguistics
project); but as far as I can tell, it is 'basically' comon
practice for analysts to code the data themselves. And I'm not
saying that mono-annotator projects are useless, sometimes you
just don't have the manpower for multi-annotator projects (and one
of the multi-annotator projects I'm involved in was really
painful; but it was instructive to see that even for categories
that we thought we had defined rather clearly, inter-annotator
agreement was rather low in some cases). But as I said earlier, it
would be nice to have some standards or at least general
guidelines for coding typological data. Minimally, I think, the
data should be published, along with at least some information on
the operational tests that were applied, even if done by a single
annotator.<br class="">
</p><p class="">I hope this clarifies my (too general) remarks in my previous
post.<br class="">
Volker<br class="">
</p>
<br class="">
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">Am 18.11.2017 um 13:27 schrieb Johanna
NICHOLS:<br class="">
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:CAHDpjwqRrP9PV8QRwsJJcakZFfzxDHpdHxikP+pCVf6gtd_7Mw@mail.gmail.com" class="">
<div dir="ltr" class="">
<div class="">
<div class="">Volker, <br class="">
<br class="">
</div>
If there's a way to do this diplomatically, could you cite an
example or two of "important publications by major
authorities of the field where these criteria are simply not
applied"? In linguistics we don't have as much technical
comment on publications as some other fields do, and maybe we
should. In journals where I see technical comments sections
those comments are refereed, edited, brief, and focused on
factual and methodological matters, i.e. about empirical
fundamentals and not debate on theoretical frameworks.</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">If there's no way to do it diplomatically, never mind.<br class="">
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
Johanna<br class="">
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br class="">
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:37 PM,
Volker Gast <span dir="ltr" class=""><<a href="mailto:volker.gast@uni-jena.de" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">volker.gast@uni-jena.de</a>></span>
wrote:<br class="">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div text="#000000" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" class=""><p class="">Matthew -- are you saying that "one cannot rule out
disjunctively defined comparative concept" because this
is what you did?</p><p class="">I am not convinced by "disjunctive comparative
concepts". Now, that's nothing for you to worry about --
I'm just one reader (actually, audience of your
ALT/2015-talk) who doesn't buy your conclusions because
he doesn't accept your operationalizations.</p><p class="">But if we want "to talk TO each other (not only PAST
each other)", as Martin writes, it would be good to have
what other fields call "standards of empirical
research". We have copied a lot of statistical methods
from fields such as the social sciences and biology. I
think it would also be beneficial to take a look at
their standards at the "lower" level -- for instances,
wrt how data is gathered, processed and classified, how
hypotheses are operationalized, etc., to make sure that
the results obtained by somebody are also accepted by
others (just think of the 5%-threshold for statistical
significance, which is just a matter of convention).<br class="">
</p><p class="">I'm aware that this type of remark is annoying for some
of you. I teach both corpus linguistics and typology. In
corpus linguistics our students deal with very basic
questions of empirical research -- like the traditional
'quality criteria' -- e.g. (external, internal)
validity, objectivity, reliability -- and then, in
typology, we read important publications by major
authorities of the field where these criteria are simply
not applied, sometimes the statistics are faulty, and
students do enquire about this. What can I say? There
are no research standards in typology? There is an
ongoing discussion about "arbitrary/subjective/random/<wbr class="">disjunctive
comparative concepts" on the Lingtype-list? I'm afraid
it wouldn't convince them. What I say is that typology
still has some way to go to in terms of research
methods. There are many non-trivial problems, as we have
seen in various discussions on this list, and we should
be aware that linguistic data is sui generis (for
instance, I think we can't adopt just any
method/software package from genetics). But we shouldn't
use "authority" as a criterion in our methodological
choices, and the choices shouldn't be made in such a way
to legitimize our own research 'ex post'.<br class="">
</p><p class="">Volker<br class="">
</p>
<br class="">
<div class="m_-3772461755557999611moz-cite-prefix">Am
18.11.2017 um 07:36 schrieb Dryer, Matthew:<br class="">
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class=""><p class="MsoNormal">With respect to Martin’s comment</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">“<span style="font-size:14.0pt;font-family:Calibri" class="">It is
my impression that such ortho-affixes (= forms
written as affixes) are perhaps even more common
than “phonologically weak” ortho-affixes, but this
is an empirical question (in his 2015 ALT
abstract, Matthew mentions 248 languages with weak
affixes, but 308 languages with only affixes of
the Tauya type, apparently confirming my
impression).</span>”</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">I realize that this is a
reasonable inference from my abstract, but one often
has to simplify things for the purposes of an
abstract. My definition of a weak affix is very
narrow and many if not most affixes that are not
weak affixes by my narrow criteria can still be
shown to be attached phonologically by broader
criteria. Furthermore, I also treat a morpheme as an
affix for the purposes of this study if it triggers
phonologically conditioned allomorphy in stems it
attaches to and it is clear from Macdonald’s
description of Tauya that some of the ortho-affixes
Martin mentions do trigger phonologically
conditioned allomorphy in stems they attach to (pp
54, 72, 74, 79). </p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">I counted an affix as weak for
the purposes of the study in my 2015 ALT talk only
if the description of it in a grammar makes clear
that it is nonsyllabic (or has nonsyllabic
allomorphs) or that it exhibits phonologically
allomorphy or triggers phonologically conditioned
allomorphy in adjacent stems. But in many grammars,
it is only in the discussion of phonology that it
becomes clear that a given affix exhibits
phonologically conditioned allomorphy or that it
triggers phonologically conditioned allomorphy in
adjacent stems. But because I wanted to include a
large sample of languages and because it is often
unclear from discussions of phonology whether
particular rules apply to particular affixes or
stems such affixes combine with, I adopted the
procedure of not consulting the discussions of
phonology in classifying ortho-affixes as weak. This
made sense for my 2015 ALT talk since I was
examining whether there is a suffixing preference
and restricting attention to weak affixes so defined
applies equally to prefixes and suffixes. For a
different type of typological study, this would have
been inappropriate. This illustrates how comparative
concepts are specific to particular typological
studies.</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">Furthermore, there are other
factors that I did not examine that are relevant to
whether a given ortho-affix is attached
phonologically. There may be clear evidence from
allophonic rules, but it is often very unclear from
grammatical descriptions whether particular
allophonic rules apply to particular ortho-affixes
or stems to which ortho-affixes are attached. And
even if the information is there in the grammatical
description, it may take a lot of work to see
whether they apply to a particular affix. For
example, careful examination of Macdonald’s
description of Tauya implies that the benefactive
ortho-affix <i class="">-pe</i> that Martin mentions is
attached phonologically, since she gives examples of
phonetic representations of forms containing this
morpheme where it takes the form [-be] after /m/
([tembe] on page 54).</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">There might also be evidence from
stress, but still be unclear how stress is assigned
to forms including ortho-affixes. For example, Tauya
has word-final stress, but it is not clear from
Macdonald’s description whether this means that
nouns bearing the ortho-affixes that Martin mentions
take stress on the ortho-affix.</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">Some of you may have noticed that
what I say here contradicts what I said in my
earlier email about comparative concepts needing to
be exhaustive. The comparative concept I used in my
2015 ALT talk was not exhaustive and was in fact
disjunctive. Since that seemed appropriate for that
study, this suggests that one cannot rule out
disjunctively defined comparative concepts. I
sympathize with Martin’s objecting to disjunctive
comparative concepts as a way to continue to use
confusing and ambiguous terms and I agree that there
is something odd about arbitrary disjunctive
comparative concepts, but it is a mistake to simply
rule out disjunctive comparative concepts.</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">I should note finally that while
it is clear that the ortho-affixes that Martin
mentions are attached phonologically, they are
actually not affixes by either his criteria or mine
since they are clitics that attach to postnominal
modifiers. [Martin has written about problems with
the use of the term “clitic”. I am in complete
agreement with him about this. But I use the term
here and elsewhere in my research (including my
upcoming ALT talk on the encliticization preference)
as a label for a comparative concept for grammatical
morphemes that are phonologically attached but
attach to stems of more than one stem class.]</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">Matthew</p>
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<span id="m_-3772461755557999611OLK_SRC_BODY_SECTION" class="">
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<span style="font-weight:bold" class="">From: </span>Lingtyp
<<a href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">lingtyp-bounces@listserv.<wbr class="">linguistlist.org</a>>
on behalf of Martin Haspelmath <<a href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>><br class="">
<span style="font-weight:bold" class="">Date: </span>Thursday,
November 16, 2017 at 7:14 PM<br class="">
<span style="font-weight:bold" class="">To: </span>"<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">lingtyp@listserv.<wbr class="">linguistlist.org</a>"
<<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">lingtyp@listserv.<wbr class="">linguistlist.org</a>><br class="">
<span style="font-weight:bold" class="">Subject: </span>Re:
[Lingtyp] wordhood: bonded vs. bound<br class="">
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" class=""> Matthew Dryer
thinks that wordhood is generally understood by
grammar authors in terms of <b class="">bondedness</b> (=
phonological weakness, as shown by nonsyllabicity
and phono-conditioned allomorphy), not in terms of
<b class="">boundness</b> (= inability to occur in
isolation).
<div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
I don’t know if this is true, but Matthew actually
recognizes that grammars often describe
grammatical markers as “affixes” even when they do
not show the two “phonological weakness” (or
bondedness) features.
<div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
For example, Tauya (a language of New Guinea) is
said to have (syllabic) case suffixes, but these
never show any allomorphy, e.g.
<div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
fena’a-ni [woman-ERG]<br class="">
na-pe [you-BEN]<br class="">
wate-’usa [house-INESS]<br class="">
Aresa-nani [Aresa-ALL]<br class="">
Tauya-sami [Tauya-ABL] (MacDonald 1990: 119-126)
<div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
It is my impression that such ortho-affixes (=
forms written as affixes) are perhaps even more
common than “phonologically weak” ortho-affixes,
but this is an empirical question (in his 2015 ALT
abstract, Matthew mentions 248 languages with weak
affixes, but 308 languages with only affixes of
the Tauya type, apparently confirming my
impression).
<div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
For this reason, I have suggested that the
stereotypical “affix” notion should perhaps be
captured in terms of boundness together with
single-root-class adjacency. Since the Tauya
case-markers attach only to nouns, they count as
affixes; by contrast, if a bound role marker
attaches to both nouns (English “for children”)
and adjectives (“for older children”) as well as
to other elements (“for many children”), we do not
regard it as an affix (but as a preposition), even
if it is bound (= does not occur in isolation;
English "for" does not).
<div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
Matthew quite rightly points out that this notion
of boundness (which goes back at least to
Bloomfield 1933: §10.1) implies that most function
words in English are bound, and in fact most
function words in most languages are bound – but
this is exactly what we want, I feel, because the
best way to define a “function word” is as a bound
element that is not an affix. Linguists often
think of function words (or “functional
categories”) as defined semantically, but it is
actually very hard to say what is the
semantic(-pragmatic) difference between a plural
marker and a word like “several”, between a dual
marker and the word “two”, between a past-tense
marker and the expression “in the past”, or
between a comitative marker and the word
“accompany”. It seems to me that these
distinctions are best characterized in terms of
boundness, i.e. inability to occur in isolation.
<div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
It may be true that occurrence in isolation is a
feature of an element that is not easy to elicit
from speakers, but in actual language use, there
are a very large number of very short utterances,
so at least positive evidence for free status
(=non-bound status) is not difficult to obtain.
<div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
In any event, it seems clear to me that some key
concepts of grammatical typology such as “flag” (=
bound role marker on a nominal) and “person index”
(= bound person marker, generally on a verb)
require the Bloomfieldian boundness notion, and
that these concepts are much easier to work with
in typology than the traditional stereotypical
notions of “case”, “adposition”, “agreement
marker”, and “pronominal clitic”. (For bound
person forms, this was a major lesson of Anna
Siewierska’s 2004 book “Person”.)
<div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
Best,<br class="">
Martin<br class="">
<br class="">
<div class="m_-3772461755557999611moz-cite-prefix">On
14.11.17 07:02, Dryer, Matthew wrote:<br class="">
</div>
<blockquote type="cite" class="">
<div class=""><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:14px">I
have a number of problems with Martin’s
proposal:</p><div style="font-size: 14px;" class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:14px"><span style="font-size:14pt" class="">"<b class="">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:</b></span></p><div style="font-size: 14px;" class=""><span style="font-size:14pt" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:14px"><b class=""><span style="font-size:14pt" class="">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."</span></b><span style="font-size:14pt" class=""></span></p><div style="font-size: 14px;" class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:14px">If
one examines the notion of “bound” from his
2013 paper, I believe it implies a
comparative concept of affix that differs
greatly from what most linguists (at last
most non-generative linguists) understand by
the term. That’s not a problem for it as a
comparative concept, but it is a comparative
concept that differs considerably from the
stereotype.</p><div style="font-size: 14px;" class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:14px">Martin’s
definition of “free and “bound” from his
2013 paper is as follows:</p><div style="font-size: 14px;" class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><b class=""><span style="font-family:Times;font-size:18px" class="">"But
distinguishing in a general way between
bound elements and free elements is
quite straightforward, because there is
a single criterion: Free forms are forms
that can occur on their own, i.e. in a
complete (possibly elliptical) utterance
(Bloomfield 1933: 160). This criterion
correlates very highly with the
criterion of contrastive use: Only free
forms can be used contrastively."</span></b></p><div style="font-size: 14px;" class=""><span style="font-size:13.0pt;font-family:Times" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:14px"><span style="font-family:Times" class="">First, I find
the notion of complete utterance
ambiguous. Does it mean utterances in
normal speech or does it include
metalinguistic uses (like “What is the
last word in the sentence “Who are you
going with”? Answer “with”). I would
assume that it does not include such
metalinguistic uses. But then many if not
most so-called function words in English
would count as bound since they cannot be
used as complete utterances. Perhaps other
speakers of English would have different
intuitions, but if so that only indicates
the lack of clarity in the notion.
Furthermore, for many function words in
English, I am not sure how to judge
whether they can occur alone as
utterances. Many such so-called function
words would appear to count as bound by
Martin’s definition, though they would not
count as affixes since they lack other
properties in his definition of “affix”.</span></p><div style="font-size: 14px;" class=""><span style="font-family:Times" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:14px"><span style="font-family:Times" class="">Second, many
languages have grammatical morphemes that
must occur adjacent to an open class word
but which behave as separate words
phonologically. These would all apparently
count as affixes by Martin’s definition.
Again, I have no problem with this as a
comparative concept, only that it means
his notion of affix deviates considerably
from the stereotype.</span></p><div style="font-size: 14px;" class=""><span style="font-family:Times" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:14px"><span style="font-family:Times" class="">Third, Martin
says that his criterion “</span><span style="font-family:Times" class="">correlates very
highly with the criterion of contrastive
use</span><span style="font-family:Times" class="">”.
But by my intuitions, the ability to occur
as complete utterances does not correlate
closely with the criterion of contrastive
use, since most so-called function words
CAN occur with contrastive use (such as
can in this sentence!), as can some
morphemes that are conventionally treated
as affixes, like <i class="">un-</i> in “I’m not
happy, I’m UNhappy”. Of course, Martin
might argue that <i class=""> un-</i> is more like
so-called function words and less like
morphemes conventionally treated as
affixes. But the fact remains that <i class="">un-</i>
is easily the locus of contrast but cannot
be used as a complete utterance. I thus
see no evidence of a close correlation
between the ability to occur as a complete
utterance and the ability to be the locus
of contrast.</span></p><div style="font-size: 14px;" class=""><span style="font-family:Times" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:14px"><span style="font-family:Times" class="">Finally, it is
my experience that languages differ in
their conventions regarding what can be a
complete utterance. Imagine two closely
related languages that differ in their
grammatical rules governing what is a
complete utterance. By Martin’s
definition, there might be a large number
of morphemes that count as separate words
in one language but as affixes in the
other language. This strikes me as odd. It
seems odd to have a criterion for what is
a word and what is an affix so dependent
on the grammatical rules in the language
for what constitutes a complete utterance.</span></p><div style="font-size: 14px;" class=""><span style="font-family:Times" class=""> </span><br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-size:14px"><span style="font-family:Times" class="">Matthew</span></p>
</div>
<div style="font-size:14px" class=""><br class="">
</div>
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<<a href="mailto:lingtyp-bounces@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">lingtyp-bounces@listserv.<wbr class="">linguistlist.org</a>>
on behalf of Martin Haspelmath <<a href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>><br class="">
<span style="font-weight:bold" class="">Date: </span>Sunday,
November 12, 2017 at 10:47 PM<br class="">
<span style="font-weight:bold" class="">To: </span>"<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">lingtyp@listserv.<wbr class="">linguistlist.org</a>"
<<a href="mailto:lingtyp@listserv.linguistlist.org" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true" class="">lingtyp@listserv.<wbr class="">linguistlist.org</a>><br class="">
<span style="font-weight:bold" class="">Subject: </span>Re:
[Lingtyp] wordhood<br class="">
</div>
<div class=""><br class="">
</div>
<div class="">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000" class=""><p class="MsoNormal">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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">(1) “Leakage” of
definitions due to vague defining
notions</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">(2) Incoherence of
definitions due to the use of different
criteria in different languages</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">The first can be
addressed by tightening the defining
notions, but the second is fatal.</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">So here’s a proposal
for defining a notion of “simple
morphosyntactic word”:</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><b class="">A simple
morphosyntactic word is a form that
consists of (minimally) a root, plus
any affixes.</b></p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal"><b class="">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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">These definitions
make use of the notions of “root” and
“root-class” (defined in Haspelmath
2012) and<span class=""> </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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">(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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">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><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div><p class="MsoNormal">Best,</p><p class="MsoNormal">Martin</p><div class=""> <br class="webkit-block-placeholder"></div>
<br class="">
<pre class="m_-3772461755557999611moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath (<a class="m_-3772461755557999611moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">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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<pre class="m_-3772461755557999611moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath (<a class="m_-3772461755557999611moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank" moz-do-not-send="true">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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Prof. Volker Gast
English and American Studies
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<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Prof. Volker Gast
English and American Studies
Ernst-Abbe-PLatz 8
D-07743 Jena
Fon: ++49 3641 9-44546
Fax: ++49 3641 9-44542</pre>
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