[Lingtyp] wordhood: responses to Haspelmath

David Gil gil at shh.mpg.de
Sun Nov 12 09:11:41 UTC 2017


Dear all,

Eitan is correct in pointing out that I didn't actually provide a 
definition of a comparative concept "word" in my abstract.  I was 
planning to sit down and do precisely this in the coming days and weeks, 
but let me take a quick stab at it now — referring to the abstract 
attached to my earlier message, and using lower- and upper-case letters 
for comparative concepts and language-specific descriptive categories 
respectively.

Preliminaries:  Presumably all languages have a set of 
(language-specific) phenomena that enable us to define a 
(language-specific) scale of Bond-Strengths, as represented in the 
horizontal axes of the graphs in (3) on the abstract.  Now to the extent 
that the resulting distribution is bimodal, as per (3a), we can then 
distinguish between "Strong Bonds", those associated with morphemes on 
the left-hand peak (which we'll end up calling "Bound Morphemes"), and 
"Weak Bonds", those associated with morphemes on the right-hand peak 
(which we'll call "Free Morphemes").

Definition: A word is a set of morphemes forming a constituent (or to 
use Daniel's house-moving metaphor earlier, "packed in a box"), such 
that all of the contained morphemes are connected with Strong Bonds.

Discussion: Yes, as Eitan points out, the criteria for Bond Strengths 
are language specific.  But for each language, one can (in principle) 
produce a graph, such as in (3a) or (3b) relating Morpheme Inventory to 
Bond Strength.  The graphs associated with each language can then be 
objectively compared across languages, distinguishing between bimodal 
and unimodal distributions.  In turn, for those languages with bimodal 
distributions (a comparative concept), these distributions can be used 
in order to define a set of Strong Bonds (a language-specific category), 
which in turn is employed, as per the above definition, to define the 
comparative category of word.

Since not all languages have bi-modal distributions of Bond Strengths, 
not all languages instantiate the comparative concept of word.  But this 
is fine, we don't expect comparative concepts to be instantiated in all 
languages; we merely demand that their presence or absence can be 
evaluated objectively.

Of course, the definition provided above is fuzzy.  And I know, from 
several very helpful conversations with Martin, that this is his main 
objection to the above proposal, namely that it does not provide the 
comfort of a categorical black-and-white distinction. But as several 
people have already pointed out in this discussion, most of the 
comparative concepts we work with are fuzzy; this is just a fact of life.

I know all of this sounds messy, and I hope to produce a more 
reader-friendly formulation of the definition in the paper I'm working 
on.  However, I believe that this definition captures the kinds of 
intuitions that probably most of us share about wordhood, but in a way 
that distinguishes rigorously between language-specific categories and 
comparative concepts, showing how a solid comparative concept can indeed 
be founded on the soft and treacherous sands of language-specific 
categories.

David



On 12/11/2017 16:02, Eitan Grossman wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> First of all, thanks for the stimulating discussion!
>
> It seems most of the discussion has focused on finding *diagnostics 
> *for (grammatical) wordhood, but there hasn't been much discussion of 
> what the *definition *of 'word' is. Unlike 'accusative marker,' the 
> definition of which many typologists would agree on, or 'perfect,' 
> which has a few different definitions but it is not hard to pick one 
> for purposes of cross-linguistic comparison, 'word' doesn't have a 
> clear or semi-consensual definition. Martin's paper shows how 
> untenable the notion of 'minimal free form' is as a cross-linguistic 
> notion.
>
> David's abstract seems like a step in a possible right direction, but 
> even he doesn't give a *definition *of word as a comparative concept. 
> Rather, he gives a diagnostic that would allow linguists to identify 
> languages that can be said to have words vs those that can't. Of 
> course, it may be possible to define 'word' in David's sense as a very 
> particular range or cutoff point within his bimodal distribution. But 
> then two questions arise:
>
> 1. What is the 'right' range that should be called 'word', and why?
> 2. The features of 'bond strength' are language-specific (e.g., 
> 'warasa ludling'), and it would require a lot of work, to say the 
> least, to operationalize them as criteria for a cross-linguistic 
> comparison.
>
> Having said that, I agree with David (if I understand him correctly) 
> that the crucial missing link is the operationalization of the notion 
> of 'bond strength' or 'boundness,' but as far as I know, this has yet 
> to be articulated for cross-linguistic purposes. Incidentally, this 
> might be a way out of the reliance of notions like 'affix' and 
> 'clitic' on the notion 'word,' because the former could be defined 
> purely in terms of 'boundness'.
>
> Best,
> Eitan
>
>
>
>
> Eitan Grossman
> Lecturer, Department of Linguistics/School of Language Sciences
> Hebrew University of Jerusalem
> Tel: +972 2 588 3809
> Fax: +972 2 588 1224
>
> Recent: /Greek Influence on Egyptian-Coptic: Contact-Induced Change in 
> an Ancient African Language /(Widmaier Verlag 
> http://widmaier-verlag.de/index.php?content=issue&isbn=978-3-943955-17-0)
>
> On Sun, Nov 12, 2017 at 1:52 AM, William Croft <wcroft at unm.edu 
> <mailto:wcroft at unm.edu>> wrote:
>
>     Matthew,
>
>       I am having a hard time reconciling your statement
>
>>     I am completely in agreement with Martin about the problems with
>>     the notion of morphosyntactic word - in fact I would go even
>>     further than him
>
>     with your statement
>
>>     Thus it is not clear that there is any problem with a comparative
>>     concept of word.
>
>     unless you mean that a morphosyntactic definition of a word is
>     even more problematic than Martin made it out to be, but that a
>     phonological definition of a word (whatever criteria those are
>     based on) is unproblematic. For the latter, these two papers based
>     on studies of phonological criteria in Tibeto-Burman languages
>     indicate that phonological criteria are also problematic, that is,
>     do not converge on the same morpheme strings as words:
>
>     Bickel, Balthasar, Kristine A. Hildebrandt and René Schiering. 
>     2009. The distribution of phonological word domains: a
>     probabilistic typology. /Phonological domains: universals and
>     deviations/, ed. Bariş Kabak and Janet Grijzenhout, 47-75. Berlin:
>     Mouton de Gruyter.
>
>     Schiering, René, Balthasar Bickel and Kristine A. Hildebrandt.
>     2010. The prosodic word is not universal. /Journal of Linguistics/
>     46.657-709.
>
>         Incidentally, your 2015 ALT talk is a counterexample to my
>     statement in an earlier email that nobody has applied a consistent
>     crosslinguistic criterion to wordhood. You took a very strict but
>     clearly crosslinguistically applicable notion of wordhood (or more
>     precisely, affixhood) -- i.e. one that everyone would agree with
>     -- and demonstrated that the suffixing preference applies to these
>     affixes. I apologize for the oversight.
>
>     Bill
>
>
>>     On Nov 11, 2017, at 4:35 PM, Dryer, Matthew <dryer at buffalo.edu
>>     <mailto:dryer at buffalo.edu>> wrote:
>>
>>     What is missing from this discussion is that Martin’s paper
>>     discusses problems with morphosyntactic criteria for words as
>>     proposed in recent literature in morphological theory, not
>>     problems with phonological criteria. But typologists base their
>>     claims on language descriptions and language descriptions
>>     primarily use phonological criteria in deciding what to represent
>>     as a word, supplemented some by morphosyntactic criteria. I am
>>     completely in agreement with Martin about the problems with the
>>     notion of morphosyntactic word - in fact I would go even further
>>     than him. But this has little bearing on typological claims that
>>     make reference to words.
>>     This is not to say that there may not be problems with
>>     phonological criteria. I would say that for every language I have
>>     worked on, there are morpheme boundaries were neither
>>     phonological criteria nor morphosyntactic criteria provide a
>>     basis for deciding whether to treat something as a word. But such
>>     morpheme boundaries represent a relatively small percentages of
>>     morpheme boundaries in the language. Thus it is not clear that
>>     there is any problem with a comparative concept of word.
>>     In the 2015 ALT talk of mine that Martin referred to, I argued
>>     that if one restricts attention to grammatical morphemes that are
>>     nonsyllabic or that exhibit morphophonemic alternations, we find
>>     clear evidence of a suffixing preference. This illustrates how
>>     the problems that Martin discusses do not present a problem for
>>     showing that there is a preference for suffixes over prefixes.
>>     Matthew
>>
>>     From:Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>     <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of
>>     "Anstey, Matthew" <MAnstey at csu.edu.au <mailto:MAnstey at csu.edu.au>>
>>     Date:Sunday, November 12, 2017 at 9:06 AM
>>     To:"lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>     <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>"
>>     <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>     <mailto:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>>
>>     Subject:Re: [Lingtyp] wordhood: responses to Haspelmath
>>
>>     Have there been any studies into the cognitive salience of the
>>     notion 'word', say, along the lines of segmentivity?
>>
>>     Such that, that all people and hence languages chunk and split
>>     language symbols one way or another, driven by a number of
>>     constraints (eg limiting semantic complexity, facilitating
>>     processing speed, allowing combinatorial possibilities like
>>     juncture/nexus joints, etc).
>>
>>     If then this a universal cognitive requirement, could the
>>     culture-language specific version of the most 'privileged' chunk,
>>     no matter much it differs around the world, be what we identify
>>     as this elusive 'word'?
>>
>>     Not sure how cognitive typology works though....
>>
>>
>>     With regards
>>     Matthew
>>
>>     On 12 Nov 2017, 8:23 AM +1030, Daniel Ross <djross3 at illinois.edu
>>     <mailto:djross3 at illinois.edu>>, wrote:
>>     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
>>     <mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru><mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru>
>>     <mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru%3E>> 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
>>     <https://maps.google.com/?q=Leninsky+prospekt+32&entry=gmail&source=g%3E-A>119991
>>     Moscow
>>     peterarkadiev at yandex.ru
>>     <mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru><mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru
>>     <mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru>>
>>     http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev
>>     <http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev>
>>
>>
>>
>>     11.11.2017, 23:49, "Daniel Ross" <djross3 at illinois.edu
>>     <mailto:djross3 at illinois.edu><mailto:djross3 at illinois.edu>
>>     <mailto:djross3 at illinois.edu%3E>>:
>>     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
>>     <mailto:wcroft at unm.edu><mailto:wcroft at unm.edu>
>>     <mailto:wcroft at unm.edu%3E>> 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
>>         <mailto: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
>>         <mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>] För
>>         William Croft
>>         Skickat: den 11 november 2017 20:06
>>         Till:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>         <mailto: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 <mailto: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
>>             <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
>>             <mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>>
>>             Cc:lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>>             <mailto: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
>>                 <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
>>                 <mailto: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
>>                 <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
>>                 <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
>>                 <https://maps.google.com/?q=Nikolaistrasse+6-10+%3E%3E%3E+D-04109+Leipzig&entry=gmail&source=g>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>             _______________________________________________
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>
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-- 
David Gil

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10, 07745 Jena, Germany

Email: gil at shh.mpg.de
Office Phone (Germany): +49-3641686834
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81281162816

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