[Lingtyp] wordhood

Mon Nov 13 05:42:34 UTC 2017

I agree that notions such as "root" and "morph" are still problematic (and I think Martin acknowledges this in his textbook on morphology, which leans heavily towards a word-and-paradigm approach).

The broader question here is what we mean by "smallest meaningful piece of form": "word" and "morpheme" are just different ways of getting at this idea. What is really needed here is a principled way of deciding whether a given piece of form is meaningful or not; and this, I think, is where most of the difficulties lie.

I would suggest that a useful and cross-linguistically applicable definition is that a piece of form is "meaningful" if and only if it activates a discourse referent (i.e. makes some entity available as a target of anaphora). This leads to our identifying meaningful units that are closer to what are traditionally identified as "phrases" (or perhaps "maximal projections") rather than words or morphemes. But given such a definition of "phrase", we can then propose a definition of "word" as "anything that lies between two phrase boundaries"; and this is probably enough for many purposes (note that it would fit well with information-theoretic approaches to wordhood).

Siva

> On 13 Nov 2017, at 7:22 am, Peter Arkadiev <peterarkadiev at yandex.ru> wrote:
> 
> Dear Martin, dear all,
>  
> the problem with "roots" as a comparative concept is that they are not well-defined either. In the 2012 paper which Martin has quoted, he defines "roots" as follows (p. 123 fn. 9): "morphs that denote things, actions, or properties"; thus, the definition of roots is based on the definition of "morph" , which in turn (ibid.) is defined as "smallest meaningful piece of form". This appears to sound OK, but the devil is in the details. Martin writes (p. 123) that "The great advantage is that we can readily identify roots in any language", but I consider this statement overly optimistic and based on the notion of "root" inferrable from such languages as English (though even there "sing-sang-sung-song" can posit problems). What about Semitic languages, where roots are abstract phonological entities with very little "substantive" meaning? If we take the most famous example from classical Arabic, what is the root of *kita:bun* 'book'? Is it the same root as in *kataba* 'he wrote' and *yaktubu* 'he writes' (and what is the common root, if any, of the latter two)? Is it a thing-denoting root or an action-denoting root? And please, be sure that, again, Arabic is just the extreme case. The very same problems with roots are found in plenty of other languages, including the most familiar ones.
>  
> Best regards,
>  
> Peter
>  
> -- 
> Peter Arkadiev, PhD
> Institute of Slavic Studies
> Russian Academy of Sciences
> Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119991 Moscow
> peterarkadiev at yandex.ru
> http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev
>  
>  
>  
> 12.11.2017, 15:48, "Martin Haspelmath" <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>:
>> 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).
>> 
>>  
>> 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”).
>> 
>>  
>> 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”.
>> 
>>  
>> 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”:
>> 
>>  
>> (1) “Leakage” of definitions due to vague defining notions
>> 
>>  
>> (2) Incoherence of definitions due to the use of different criteria in different languages
>> 
>>  
>> The first can be addressed by tightening the defining notions, but the second is fatal.
>> 
>>  
>> 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.
>> 
>>  
>> 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.
>> 
>>  
>> 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.
>> 
>>  
>> So here’s a proposal for defining a notion of “simple morphosyntactic word”:
>> 
>>  
>> A simple morphosyntactic word is a form that consists of (minimally) a root, plus any affixes.
>> 
>>  
>> 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:
>> 
>>  
>> 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.
>> 
>>  
>> These definitions make use of the notions of “root” and “root-class” (defined in Haspelmath 2012) and  “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.)
>> 
>>  
>> (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”.)
>> 
>>  
>> 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.
>> 
>>  
>> 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?
>> 
>>  
>> Best,
>> 
>> Martin
>> 
>>  
>>  
>> -- 
>> 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	
>> D-07745 Jena  
>> &
>> Leipzig University 
>> IPF 141199
>> Nikolaistrasse 6-10
>> D-04109 Leipzig    
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> ,
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