[Lingtyp] wordhood

Mon Nov 13 16:48:51 UTC 2017

Dear all,

> It is significant to observe that translators work with words, and they
often strive to render, as much as possible, a word of the source language
with a word of the target language, even though this is often very
difficult.

I would not personally say so. In my (small) experience as a literary
translator, I much more often had to think about whether the overall
impression that the translated text creates is similar to the original,
including things like the style in which the characters talk (overall, not
in any particular sentence). Of course, translators do strive to render the
precise meaning, too, but I find it much more often has to do with the
sentence meaning and even a paragraph meaning (and so on... back to the
overall "meaning"), and direct correspondence between smaller units like
words is often readily sacrificed and ignored.

While it is likely to be different in court and medical translation, I
suspect that there, too, the ultimate goal is not to find a direct
correspondence between two small units of communication, but rather to
convey the full message?

Olga
PhD student
Department of Linguistics
University of Washington

On Mon, Nov 13, 2017 at 8:36 AM Hagège Claude <claude-hagege at wanadoo.fr>
wrote:

>
>
> Dear all,
>
>
>
>         In this discussion on wordhood, iIt may be useful to add  that it
> is true that we typologists do not work with the notion « word », but with
> notions  like morphemes, compounds, derivatives, internal phoneme
> variations (e.g. Hebrew, Arabic, Rotuman, strong verbs in English (as well
> as German, Swedish, etc.), affixes (provided these are not defined in a
> circular way  (cf. Martin’s (12-11, 15.48) definition  « 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 »). Even though these notions are, to some extent, fuzzy (but mostly
> identifiable, as illustrated, for example, by the way R.M.W. Dixon writes
> *seam-str-ess* (*Making New Words*, OUP, 2014, 324). We prefer working
> with these notions rather than with the notion « word ». However, words
> have a phenomenal, and not noumenal or Platonic, existence *:*
>
> *1)  *In all languages, including stress-final ones, words are identified
> and delimited by *stress *;
>
>
>
> *2)  *Typologists still work with the tripartite distinction introduced,
> in the German Romantic era, by  the Schlegel brothers (1808, 1818), and
> then taken over (1836-1860) by Humboldt, Bopp, Pott, Schleicher, Steinthal
> and others, among whom Duponceau, who, based on Amerindian languages,
> introduced in 1838 the notion of polysynthetic languages. Now, we  should
> not loose sight that this tripartite distinction is entirely based on the
> notion of word : *it is the structure of the word which underlies the
> isolating, agglutinative and flexional language types *;
>
>
>
> *3)  *« word » is admittedly not a specific linguistic notion. It is, to
> a large extent, a graphic notion. It is significant, for instance, that, as
> recalled by   Tianqiao citing Packard (12-11, 17.43),  the Chinese
> equivalent of « word » is    字 *zì*, which actually means « Chinese
>  character » ( 词 *cí * is a grammatical notion, and is barely used when
> simply referring to words, as in  他说话字字清楚 (*tā* « he » *shuōhuà*
> « speak » *zì* « word » *zì* « word » *qīngchu* « clear ») « when he
> speaks every word is clear ». But, more precisely, the notion of « word »
>  is, essentially, an *institution*. It is significant to observe that
> *translators* work with words, and they often strive to render, as much
> as possible, a word of the source language with a word of the target
> language, even though this is often very difficult.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
>
>
> Claude (Hagège)
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *De :* Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org] *De la
> part de* Martin Haspelmath
> *Envoyé :* lundi 13 novembre 2017 10:22
> *À :* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> *Objet :* Re: [Lingtyp] wordhood
>
>
>
> Yes, Peter Arkadiev is quite right to point out that the root concept as
> tentatively defined by me earlier (in 2012
> <http://phonetics.linguistics.ucla.edu/wpl/issues/wpl17/wpl17.html>) does
> not extend readily to cases like English "sing/sang", let alone Arabic
> "kataba/yaktubu".
>
> But remember that typological classification does not have to be
> exhaustive (unlike description, which must cover everying in a given
> language): Typological studies focus on clear similarities and clear
> differences between languages, but there are also many aspects of language
> structure that are not readily comparable.
>
> I learned this lesson originally from Bickel & Nichols's 2005 WALS chapter
> on "structure sampling". In their sub-chapter on "Sampling case and tense
> formatives" (http://wals.info/chapter/s5), they say:
>
> "... This makes it impossible to typologize whole languages for fusion and
> exponence. In response to this, we sampled individual formatives..."
>
> A similar point was made by Bill Croft in his 2016 LT contribution
> <https://www.degruyter.com/view/j/lity.2016.20.issue-2/> on comparative
> concepts (§5):
>
> "... “large” conceptual categories are in fact not good comparative
> concepts, and typologists use narrower conceptual categories or even
> individual tokens (as in elicitation from a stimulus like a cutting/break
> video clip). Language-specific categories are often large, especially if
> they are defined by occurrence in a role in just one construction, and are
> defined as all elements that occur in that constructional role."
>
> Likewise, Matthew Dryer points out in the current discussion that
> comparative concepts need to be narrower than descriptive categories:
>
> "there is often a way to define one’s comparative concept in a “narrower”
> way so that at least some problematic cases can be classified"
>
> So yes, the Arabic "root" concept needs to be very abstract, so abstract
> that it no longer matches my comparative root concept (and the same applies
> to English "sing/sang" etc.). But this does not mean that the comparative
> root concept needs to be abstract in a similar way. I think that if it is
> not sufficiently concrete, it cannot serve as a comparative concept
> anymore, because only fairly concrete concepts can be applied across
> languages using the SAME criteria.
>
> If you now wonder whether I would be forced to say that Arabic is a
> language without roots, the answer is yes, probably, to a large extent
> (though there are probably a few noun roots, i.e. forms whose vocalic
> pattern does not have an additional singular meaning, e.g. roots of mass
> nouns). This may sound unacceptable to some, but note that Arabic-like
> languages are extremely rare, so the fairly concrete root concept still
> matches the traditional root concept to a large extent. (But I admit that
> the situation is not a happy one, because it was actually Arabic and Hebrew
> grammarians who brought the "root" concept into linguistics; so maybe I
> should change the term to something different, such as "radix".)
>
> In any event, whatever problems my root concept has, it does not have the
> fatal problem of incoherence, only the (fairly ubiquitous) vagueness
> problem. So I do have hopes that my definition of "affix" can stand (though
> Chao Li rightly points out that in my definition of “simple
> morphosyntactic word” as “a form that consists of (minimally) a root, plus
> any affixes”, “free” needs to be added before “form”).
>
> Best,
> Martin
>
>
> On 12.11.17 21:22, Peter Arkadiev 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>
> <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)
>
> 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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>
>
> --
>
> Martin Haspelmath (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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