[Lingtyp] wordhood

Wu Jianming wu.jianming2011 at hotmail.com
Tue Nov 14 04:03:40 UTC 2017


Dear all,
    Manny thanks  for this discussion. May I share  some of my thoughts.  In my country, we used to be  taught that  "ever-increasing productivity can sometimes oudate the productive relations",  and I think this is probably applicable to the word of "word" as well, for our knowledge of it has increased dramatically in the past years.
        One solution naturally is to redefine wordhood in each of the languages and this is probably "descriptive categories" we need in language -particular systems.  The other solution  is to decompose the term (originally seen in old English)  into various  elements, and once they are used for language comparison or classification, they are likely to be "comparative concepts".  These two solutions are not mutually exclusive but are largely determined by the economy of language studies of their own purposes.
   There is also a solution that is to maintain the regime(relations) of wordhood, and see some difficulties  in other languages from time to time. But this is no longer news to the typologists any more.

Best regards! 

Jianming


---
Dr. Jianming Wu
Institute of Linguistics
Shanghai International Studies University
550 Dalian Rd. (W.)
Shanghai 200083
P. R. China

________________________________
From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of Johanna Laakso <johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at>
Sent: 13 November 2017 20:44:38
To: Martin Haspelmath; lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] wordhood

Dear all,

thank you to all for this fascinating discussion!

I agree with Martin Haspelmath in that "root" is a highly problematic term, also because of its half-esoteric connotations in some traditions (my two cents: http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/jeful.2017.8.1.08 ). What about "stem"?

Best
Johanna Laakso
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Universität Wien, Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft (EVSL)
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Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>> kirjoitti 13.11.2017 kello 10.21:

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<mailto: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><mailto: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
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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
&
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