[Lingtyp] wordhood: bonded vs. bound

[Dryer, Matthew]

With respect to Martin’s comment

“It is my impression that such ortho-affixes (= forms written as affixes) are perhaps even more common than “phonologically weak” ortho-affixes, but this is an empirical question (in his 2015 ALT abstract, Matthew mentions 248 languages with weak affixes, but 308 languages with only affixes of the Tauya type, apparently confirming my impression).”

I realize that this is a reasonable inference from my abstract, but one often has to simplify things for the purposes of an abstract. My definition of a weak affix is very narrow and many if not most affixes that are not weak affixes by my narrow criteria can still be shown to be attached phonologically by broader criteria. Furthermore, I also treat a morpheme as an affix for the purposes of this study if it triggers phonologically conditioned allomorphy in stems it attaches to and it is clear from Macdonald’s description of Tauya that some of the ortho-affixes Martin mentions do trigger phonologically conditioned allomorphy in stems they attach to (pp 54, 72, 74, 79).

I counted an affix as weak for the purposes of the study in my 2015 ALT talk only if the description of it in a grammar makes clear that it is nonsyllabic (or has nonsyllabic allomorphs) or that it exhibits phonologically allomorphy or triggers phonologically conditioned allomorphy in adjacent stems. But in many grammars, it is only in the discussion of phonology that it becomes clear that a given affix exhibits phonologically conditioned allomorphy or that it triggers phonologically conditioned allomorphy in adjacent stems. But because I wanted to include a large sample of languages and because it is often unclear from discussions of phonology whether particular rules apply to particular affixes or stems such affixes combine with, I adopted the procedure of not consulting the discussions of phonology in classifying ortho-affixes as weak. This made sense for my 2015 ALT talk since I was examining whether there is a suffixing preference and restricting attention to weak affixes so defined applies equally to prefixes and suffixes. For a different type of typological study, this would have been inappropriate. This illustrates how comparative concepts are specific to particular typological studies.

Furthermore, there are other factors that I did not examine that are relevant to whether a given ortho-affix is attached phonologically. There may be clear evidence from allophonic rules, but it is often very unclear from grammatical descriptions whether particular allophonic rules apply to particular ortho-affixes or stems to which ortho-affixes are attached. And even if the information is there in the grammatical description, it may take a lot of work to see whether they apply to a particular affix. For example, careful examination of Macdonald’s description of Tauya implies that the benefactive ortho-affix -pe that Martin mentions is attached phonologically, since she gives examples of phonetic representations of forms containing this morpheme where it takes the form [-be] after /m/ ([tembe] on page 54).

There might also be evidence from stress, but still be unclear how stress is assigned to forms including ortho-affixes. For example, Tauya has word-final stress, but it is not clear from Macdonald’s description whether this means that nouns bearing the ortho-affixes that Martin mentions take stress on the ortho-affix.

Some of you may have noticed that what I say here contradicts what I said in my earlier email about comparative concepts needing to be exhaustive. The comparative concept I used in my 2015 ALT talk was not exhaustive and was in fact disjunctive. Since that seemed appropriate for that study, this suggests that one cannot rule out disjunctively defined comparative concepts. I sympathize with Martin’s objecting to disjunctive comparative concepts as a way to continue to use confusing and ambiguous terms and I agree that there is something odd about arbitrary disjunctive comparative concepts, but it is a mistake to simply rule out disjunctive comparative concepts.

I should note finally that while it is clear that the ortho-affixes that Martin mentions are attached phonologically, they are actually not affixes by either his criteria or mine since they are clitics that attach to postnominal modifiers. [Martin has written about problems with the use of the term “clitic”. I am in complete agreement with him about this. But I use the term here and elsewhere in my research (including my upcoming ALT talk on the encliticization preference) as a label for a comparative concept for grammatical morphemes that are phonologically attached but attach to stems of more than one stem class.]

Matthew

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>>
Date: Thursday, November 16, 2017 at 7:14 PM
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: bonded vs. bound

Matthew Dryer thinks that wordhood is generally understood by grammar authors in terms of bondedness (= phonological weakness, as shown by nonsyllabicity and phono-conditioned allomorphy), not in terms of boundness (= inability to occur in isolation).

I don’t know if this is true, but Matthew actually recognizes that grammars often describe grammatical markers as “affixes” even when they do not show the two “phonological weakness” (or bondedness) features.

For example, Tauya (a language of New Guinea) is said to have (syllabic) case suffixes, but these never show any allomorphy, e.g.

fena’a-ni [woman-ERG]
na-pe [you-BEN]
wate-’usa [house-INESS]
Aresa-nani [Aresa-ALL]
Tauya-sami [Tauya-ABL] (MacDonald 1990: 119-126)

It is my impression that such ortho-affixes (= forms written as affixes) are perhaps even more common than “phonologically weak” ortho-affixes, but this is an empirical question (in his 2015 ALT abstract, Matthew mentions 248 languages with weak affixes, but 308 languages with only affixes of the Tauya type, apparently confirming my impression).

For this reason, I have suggested that the stereotypical “affix” notion should perhaps be captured in terms of boundness together with single-root-class adjacency. Since the Tauya case-markers attach only to nouns, they count as affixes; by contrast, if a bound role marker attaches to both nouns (English “for children”) and adjectives (“for older children”) as well as to other elements (“for many children”), we do not regard it as an affix (but as a preposition), even if it is bound (= does not occur in isolation; English "for" does not).

Matthew quite rightly points out that this notion of boundness (which goes back at least to Bloomfield 1933: §10.1) implies that most function words in English are bound, and in fact most function words in most languages are bound – but this is exactly what we want, I feel, because the best way to define a “function word” is as a bound element that is not an affix. Linguists often think of function words (or “functional categories”) as defined semantically, but it is actually very hard to say what is the semantic(-pragmatic) difference between a plural marker and a word like “several”, between a dual marker and the word “two”, between a past-tense marker and the expression “in the past”, or between a comitative marker and the word “accompany”. It seems to me that these distinctions are best characterized in terms of boundness, i.e. inability to occur in isolation.

It may be true that occurrence in isolation is a feature of an element that is not easy to elicit from speakers, but in actual language use, there are a very large number of very short utterances, so at least positive evidence for free status (=non-bound status) is not difficult to obtain.

In any event, it seems clear to me that some key concepts of grammatical typology such as “flag” (= bound role marker on a nominal) and “person index” (= bound person marker, generally on a verb) require the Bloomfieldian boundness notion, and that these concepts are much easier to work with in typology than the traditional stereotypical notions of “case”, “adposition”, “agreement marker”, and “pronominal clitic”. (For bound person forms, this was a major lesson of Anna Siewierska’s 2004 book “Person”.)

Best,
Martin

On 14.11.17 07:02, Dryer, Matthew wrote:
I have a number of problems with Martin’s proposal:

"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."

If one examines the notion of “bound” from his 2013 paper, I believe it implies a comparative concept of affix that differs greatly from what most linguists (at last most non-generative linguists) understand by the term. That’s not a problem for it as a comparative concept, but it is a comparative concept that differs considerably from the stereotype.

Martin’s definition of “free and “bound” from his 2013 paper is as follows:

"But distinguishing in a general way between bound elements and free elements is quite straightforward, because there is a single criterion: Free forms are forms that can occur on their own, i.e. in a complete (possibly elliptical) utterance (Bloomfield 1933: 160). This criterion correlates very highly with the criterion of contrastive use: Only free forms can be used contrastively."

First, I find the notion of complete utterance ambiguous. Does it mean utterances in normal speech or does it include metalinguistic uses (like “What is the last word in the sentence “Who are you going with”? Answer “with”). I would assume that it does not include such metalinguistic uses. But then many if not most so-called function words in English would count as bound since they cannot be used as complete utterances. Perhaps other speakers of English would have different intuitions, but if so that only indicates the lack of clarity in the notion. Furthermore, for many function words in English, I am not sure how to judge whether they can occur alone as utterances. Many such so-called function words would appear to count as bound by Martin’s definition, though they would not count as affixes since they lack other properties in his definition of “affix”.

Second, many languages have grammatical morphemes that must occur adjacent to an open class word but which behave as separate words phonologically. These would all apparently count as affixes by Martin’s definition. Again, I have no problem with this as a comparative concept, only that it means his notion of affix deviates considerably from the stereotype.

Third, Martin says that his criterion “correlates very highly with the criterion of contrastive use”. But by my intuitions, the ability to occur as complete utterances does not correlate closely with the criterion of contrastive use, since most so-called function words CAN occur with contrastive use (such as can in this sentence!), as can some morphemes that are conventionally treated as affixes, like un- in “I’m not happy, I’m UNhappy”. Of course, Martin might argue that un- is more like so-called function words and less like morphemes conventionally treated as affixes. But the fact remains that un- is easily the locus of contrast but cannot be used as a complete utterance. I thus see no evidence of a close correlation between the ability to occur as a complete utterance and the ability to be the locus of contrast.

Finally, it is my experience that languages differ in their conventions regarding what can be a complete utterance. Imagine two closely related languages that differ in their grammatical rules governing what is a complete utterance. By Martin’s definition, there might be a large number of morphemes that count as separate words in one language but as affixes in the other language. This strikes me as odd. It seems odd to have a criterion for what is a word and what is an affix so dependent on the grammatical rules in the language for what constitutes a complete utterance.

Matthew

From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org<mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org>> on behalf of Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>>
Date: Sunday, November 12, 2017 at 10:47 PM
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

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








--
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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