<div dir="ltr">Think about the English prefix faux, written as a separate word, but with no wordhood status.<div><br></div><div>-Mark</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Fri, 26 Nov 2021 at 22:02, David Gil <<a href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de">gil@shh.mpg.de</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
<p>Ian, actually I would say that the emergence of spaces is neither
necessary nor sufficient as evidence for wordhood: it's not
sufficient because orthographies make use of many conventions
lacking any kind of grammatical reality — consider, for example,
English digraphs such as <sh> and <th>. Still, as
argued in Gil (2020), naturalistically emerging orthographies
*can*, albeit with caution, be used as a potential source of
evidence for grammatical structures.<br>
</p>
<div>On 26/11/2021 12:54, JOO, Ian [Student]
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div name="messageBodySection">
<div dir="auto"><span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Dear
David,</span><br>
<br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">thank you for
introducing your interesting paper which I’ll have a look
into soon.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">But, I don’t think
speakers not employing spaces necessarily indicates the
absence of wordhood.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">In many traditional
orthographies, there are no spaces at all: Thai, Tibetan,
Khmer, Japanese, pre-modern Korean, etc.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">But that wouldn’t
necessarily mean that Thai speakers don’t perceive words.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">Many orthographies
only transcribe consonants - but that wouldn’t mean that the
speakers don’t perceive vowels as phonological units.</span><br>
<span style="font-family:"Times New Roman"">So I think the
emergence of spaces is sufficient, but not necessary,
evidence of wordhood.</span></div>
</div>
<div name="messageSignatureSection"><br>
Regards,
<div dir="auto">Ian</div>
</div>
<div name="messageReplySection">On 26 Nov 2021, 6:45 PM +0800,
David Gil <a href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank"><gil@shh.mpg.de></a>, wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite" style="border-left-color:grey;border-left-width:thin;border-left-style:solid;margin:5px;padding-left:10px">
<div>Following on Nikolaus' comment,
it is also an experiment that is performed whenever speakers
of an unwritten language decide to introduce an orthography
for the first time: Do they insert spaces, and if so where?</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>I wrote about about this in Gil
(2020), with reference to a naturalistic corpus of SMS
messages in Riau Indonesian, produced in 2003, which was the
year everybody in the village I was staying in got their
first mobile phones and suddenly had to figure out how to
write their language. In the 2020 article, my focus was
more on the presence or absence of evidence for bound
morphology, and less on whether they introduce spaces in the
first case. What I did not mention there, but which is most
germane to Ian's query, is the latter question, whether they
use spaces at all. In fact, my corpus contains lots of
messages that were written without spaces at all. Within a
couple of years the orthography became more
conventionalized, and everybody started using spaces, but to
begin with, at least, it seemed like many speakers were not
entertaining any (meta-)linguistic notion of 'word'
whatsoever.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>(BTW, in Riau and many other
dialects of Indonesian, the word for 'word',
<i>kata</i>, also means 'say'.)</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>David</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:27pt;text-align:justify">
<span>Gil,
David (2020) "What Does It Mean to Be an Isolating
Language? The Case of Riau Indonesian", in D. Gil and A.
Schapper eds.,
<i>Austronesian Undressed: How and Why Languages Become
Isolating</i>, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 9-96.</span></p>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>On 26/11/2021 12:11, Nikolaus P
Himmelmann wrote:</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<p>Hi<br>
</p>
<div>On 26/11/2021 10:17, JOO, Ian
[Student] wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div name="messageBodySection">
<div dir="auto"><br>
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?<br>
It would be an interesting experiment. I’d be happy to
be informed of any previous study who conducted such
an experiment.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<p>Yes, indeed. And it is an experiment, though largely
uncontrolled, that is carried out whenever someone carries
out fieldwork on an undocumented lect. In this context,
speakers provide evidence for word units in two ways: a)
in elicitation when prompted by pointing or with a word
from a contact language; b) when chunking a recording into
chunks that can be written down by the researcher.</p>
<p>In my experience, speakers across a given community are
pretty consistent in both activities though one may
distinguish two basic types speakers. One group provides
word-like units, so when you ask for "stone" you get a
minimal form for stone. The other primarily provides
utterance-like units. So you do not get "stone" but rather
"look at this stone", "how big the stone is", "stones for
building ovens" or the like.</p>
<p>Depending on the language, there is some variation in the
units provided in both activities but this is typically
restricted to the kind of phenomena that later on cause
the main problems in the analytical reconstruction of a
word unit, i.e. mostly phenomena that come under the broad
term of "clitics". In my view, one should clearly
distinguish between these analytical reconstructions,
which are basic building blocks of grammatial
descriptions, and the "natural" units provided by
speakers, which are primary data providing the basis for
the description.<br>
</p>
<p>Best</p>
<p>Nikolaus<br>
</p>
</blockquote>
<p><br>
</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<pre cols="72">--
David Gil
Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
Email: <a href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank">gil@shh.mpg.de</a>
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091
</pre>
</blockquote>
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<pre cols="72">--
David Gil
Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany
Email: <a href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de" target="_blank">gil@shh.mpg.de</a>
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091
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