[Lingtyp] wordhood: responses to Haspelmath

Sat Nov 11 21:52:05 UTC 2017

Just a quick clarification: my metaphor was just a comparison to suggest
there might be different sizes/levels of words (depending on what we mean
by that), not a theoretical point about how to analyze words in particular
or any claims about morphology.

But your clarification is appreciated!

Daniel

On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 1:04 PM, Peter Arkadiev <peterarkadiev at yandex.ru>
wrote:

> Dear all.
>
> just to add to the cunundrum, many contemporary morphologists do not
> believe that "words are boxes for morphemes", as Danny put it, and do not
> use the concept of "morpheme" at all, operating with features and their
> exponents and paradigmatic relations between words instead (see work by
> Stephen Anderson, Gregory Stump, Jim Blevins and many, many others). For
> me, as a morphologist, this makes much sense, because I know that, first,
> there are languages where much if not most morphological information is
> expressed by internal modification rather than by affixes (cf. the Western
> Nilotic language Dinka as decsribed by Torben Andersen as a possibly
> extreme case), and, second, even in those cases where it is arguably
> possible to segment words into discrete formatives, the relations between
> those and the meanings expressed in the word are notoriously complex (cf.
> Nen and its relatives as described by Nick Evans and his associates as a
> possibly extreme case). Whether this bears on the universal applicability
> of the notion of "word" is unclear to me; however, what is clear to me is
> that if "word" is not well-defined, then "morpheme" is still worse.
>
> Best regards,
>
> Peter
>
>
>
> --
> Peter Arkadiev, PhD
> Institute of Slavic Studies
> Russian Academy of Sciences
> Leninsky prospekt 32
> <https://maps.google.com/?q=Leninsky+prospekt+32&entry=gmail&source=g>-A
> 119991 Moscow
> peterarkadiev at yandex.ru
> http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev
>
>
>
> 11.11.2017, 23:49, "Daniel Ross" <djross3 at illinois.edu>:
>
> I did not mean anyone in particular was being too extreme, sorry if I gave
> that impression. I just wanted to point out that words can still exist
> language-internally.
>
> I agree with the last two replies to he thread.
>
> To me, the question is whether words are the same across languages, in the
> same way that nouns and verbs may not be. But we still do talk about nouns
> and verbs (and, yes, families, however unclear the definition may be).
>
> One other question I realized I wanted to add is that words are like boxes
> for morphemes, packaging them in groups of some kind. I wonder if the idea
> of words therefore must be unique, even within a language. Could it be that
> words exist on a continuum, just like larger and smaller boxes you might
> use to pack up all of the items in your house when moving? Of course I'm
> not sure what if anything would be left as the "essence" of words then. If
> that is not the case I'd like to know why. (Maybe just because it would
> make typology more complex so we'd rather avoid it?)
>
> Daniel
>
> On Saturday, November 11, 2017, William Croft <wcroft at unm.edu> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> Bill
>
> > On Nov 11, 2017, at 12:16 PM, Östen Dahl <oesten at ling.su.se> wrote:
> >
> > 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:
> >
> > "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."
> >
> > Still, we think we know what a family is.
> >
> > Östen
> >
> >
> > -----Ursprungligt meddelande-----
> > Från: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] För
> William Croft
> > Skickat: den 11 november 2017 20:06
> > Till: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> > Ämne: Re: [Lingtyp] wordhood: responses to Haspelmath
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.)
> >
> > Bill
> >
> >> On Nov 11, 2017, at 11:47 AM, Edith A Moravcsik <edith at uwm.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> 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?
> >>
> >> Edith Moravcsik
> >>
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] On
> >> Behalf Of Frederick J Newmeyer
> >> Sent: Saturday, November 11, 2017 11:04 AM
> >> To: Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
> >> Cc: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> >> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] wordhood: responses to Haspelmath
> >>
> >> 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?
> >>
> >> --fritz
> >>
> >>
> >> Frederick J. Newmeyer
> >> Professor Emeritus, University of Washington Adjunct Professor, U of
> >> British Columbia and Simon Fraser U
> >>
> >> On Sat, 11 Nov 2017, Martin Haspelmath wrote:
> >>
> >>> As far as I'm aware, only one typologist has taken up the challenge
> >>> 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).
> >>>
> >>> Otherwise, the reaction has generally been that this is old news (for
> >>> those with no stake in the syntax-morphology distinction), or that
> >>> the distinction is fuzzy, like almost all distinctions in language.
> >>> But the latter reaction misses the point that it's not clear whether
> >>> there are any cross-linguistic regularities to begin with (apart from
> >>> orthographic conventions) that point to the cross-linguistic
> >>> relevance of something like a "word" notion. (The results of the
> >>> recent work by Jim Blevins and colleagues do seem to point in this
> >>> direction, but it is only based on four European languages.)
> >>>
> >>> An interesting case is OUP's recent handbook on polysynthesis: While
> >>> 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.
> >>>
> >>> (The one paper that addresses the issue, by Bickel & Zúñiga, agrees
> >>> 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:
> >>> http://www.comparativelinguistics.uzh.ch/en/bickel/publications/in-pr
> >>> e
> >>> ss.html)
> >>>
> >>> Best,
> >>> Martin
> >>>
> >>> ***********************************
> >>>
> >>> Evidence for the suffixing preference
> >>>
> >>> Matthew S. Dryer
> >>>
> >>> University at Buffalo
> >>>
> >>> Haspelmath (2011) argues that there are no good criteria for
> >>> distinguishing affixes from separate words, so that claims that make
> >>> reference to a distinction between words and affixes are suspect. He
> >>> claims that there is therefore no good evidence for the suffixing
> >>> 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.
> >>>
> >>> 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.
> >>> 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.
> >>> Type 1 affixes are either ones that are nonsyllabic, consisting only
> >>> of consonants, or ones that exhibit allomorphy that is conditioned
> >>> phonologically by verb stems. Type
> >>> 2 affixes are those that exhibit neither of these two properties. The
> >>> reason that this distinction is relevant is that grammatical
> >>> morphemes of the first sort are almost always represented as affixes
> >>> rather than as separate words in grammatical descriptions, so that we
> >>> 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.
> >>>
> >>> The results of my study show that this prediction is not confirmed.
> >>> They show that for both types of affixes, suffixes outnumber prefixes
> >>> by a little over 2.5 to 1. The number of languages in my sample with
> >>> 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.
> >>>
> >>> This provides evidence that, at least for tense-aspect affixes, the
> suffixing preference is real and not an artifact of orthographic
> conventions.
> >>>
> >>> References
> >>>
> >>> Haspelmath, Martin. 2011. The indeterminacy of word segmentation and
> >>> the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia Linguistica 45: 31-80.>
> >>>
> >>> On 10.11.17 06:11, Adam J Tallman wrote:
> >>>     I am writing a paper about wordhood - has anyone responded to
> Haspelmath's 2011 Folia Linguistica paper on the topic?
> >>>
> >>> 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.
> >>>
> >>> On is Blevins (2016) Word and Paradigm Morphology and another is
> Geertzen, Jeroen, James P. Blevins & Petar Milin. ‘Informativeness of unit
> boundaries’
> >>> [pdf]. Italian Journal of Linguistics 28(2), 1–24.
> >>>
> >>> Any correspondence in this regard would be greatly appreciated,
> >>>
> >>> Adam
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> Adam J.R. Tallman Investigador del Museo de Etnografía y Folklore, la
> >>> Paz PhD candidate, University of Texas at Austin
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de) Max Planck Institute for
> >>> the Science of Human History
> >>> Kahlaische Strasse 10
> <https://maps.google.com/?q=Kahlaische+Strasse+10&entry=gmail&source=g>
> >>> D-07745 Jena
> >>> &
> >>> Leipzig University
> >>> IPF 141199
> >>> Nikolaistrasse 6-10
> <https://maps.google.com/?q=Nikolaistrasse+6-10+%3E%3E%3E+D-04109+Leipzig&entry=gmail&source=g>
> >>> D-04109 Leipzig
> <https://maps.google.com/?q=Nikolaistrasse+6-10+%3E%3E%3E+D-04109+Leipzig&entry=gmail&source=g>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
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