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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">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 class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">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 class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">(BTW, in Riau and many other dialects
of Indonesian, the word for 'word', <i>kata</i>, also means
'say'.)</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">David</div>
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<p class="MsoNormal"
style="margin-left:27.0pt;text-align:justify;text-indent:
-27.0pt"><span
style="mso-bidi-font-size:12.0pt;font-family:"Times New
Roman",serif;
mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language:JA">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>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 26/11/2021 12:11, Nikolaus P
Himmelmann wrote:</div>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix"><br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:c36ff045-24fa-44ae-4468-c65128f9bf03@uni-koeln.de">
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<p>Hi<br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 26/11/2021 10:17, JOO, Ian
[Student] wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:f3bf0245-64cd-43f5-a5a5-0af9222c73ba@Spark">
<title></title>
<div name="messageBodySection">
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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 class="moz-signature" 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 class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:gil@shh.mpg.de">gil@shh.mpg.de</a>
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091
</pre>
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