[Lingtyp] wordhood: bonded vs. bound
Johanna NICHOLS
johanna at berkeley.edu
Sat Nov 18 12:40:41 UTC 2017
I want to come back to the question of consistency in disjunctive
definitions, i.e. the danger that linguists pick and choose which
diagnostics to apply for which languages. Without a more careful review of
the literature I can't tell whether what's been done is (a) cherry-picking
or (b) use of as many of the criteria as are applicable to the language in
question. If it's the latter, or any other strict procedure for choosing,
things are more rigorous and consistent than is assumed.
In the cherry-picking view a set of criteria are treated like this:
(1) Criterion A, and/or
Criterion B, and/or
Criterion D, and/or
Criterion D, and/or
Criterion E.
What would be the impact of using them like this:
(2) Criterion A if applicable; if not
Criterion B if applicable; if not
Criterion C if applicable; if not
Criterion D if applicable; if not
Criterion E.
The first way gives you a free choice to choose what works. The second way
requires you to go through the criteria in a set order, starting with a
specific one as first candidate, and proceeding to the second only if the
first is inapplicable, i.e. if the language lacks the means to use it. If
the language does have the means for criterion A but fails to deploy them
in such a way that we could use it to identify wordhood, then we have to
stop, and the outcome is No, the object in question is not a word. Only if
criterion A is completely inapplicable to the language do we get to try B.
And so on. The procedure stops at the first success: if Criterion A is
applicable and distinguishes some unit, that unit is a word. If none are
applicable the language has nothing that passes muster as a word.
If the criteria are carefully chosen and defined and ordered, this
procedure is rigorous and consistent. (Both theoretical and empirical work
would have to go into choosing and ordering them.) (2) is probably too
strict and would give many false negatives (languages with no such thing as
a word). Alternatives might be:
(3) All of Criteria A-E that are applicable.
(4) A majority of Criteria A-E that are applicable.
(5) (Some more complex combination of ordering and applicability.)
(6) (Some constraint other than applicability, plus rules for choosing.)
Of these, (3) probably overdoes the rigor. (4) allows for inconsistency
since you can pick and choose to make up your majority. (2), (3), and (4)
are theoretically unprincipled since applicability is due to random
typological or historical contingencies. Something like (5) or (6) might
strike a good balance.
So, to what extent have procedures like (2)-(6) been implicit in what has
actually been done in the literature? Or what such approach to disjunctive
criteria might work? Maybe fuzzy concepts can have some bones in them
after all.
On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 3:27 PM, Johanna NICHOLS <johanna at berkeley.edu>
wrote:
> Volker,
>
> If there's a way to do this diplomatically, could you cite an example or
> two of "important publications by major authorities of the field where
> these criteria are simply not applied"? In linguistics we don't have as
> much technical comment on publications as some other fields do, and maybe
> we should. In journals where I see technical comments sections those
> comments are refereed, edited, brief, and focused on factual and
> methodological matters, i.e. about empirical fundamentals and not debate on
> theoretical frameworks.
>
> If there's no way to do it diplomatically, never mind.
>
> Johanna
>
> On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 12:37 PM, Volker Gast <volker.gast at uni-jena.de>
> wrote:
>
>> Matthew -- are you saying that "one cannot rule out disjunctively defined
>> comparative concept" because this is what you did?
>>
>> I am not convinced by "disjunctive comparative concepts". Now, that's
>> nothing for you to worry about -- I'm just one reader (actually, audience
>> of your ALT/2015-talk) who doesn't buy your conclusions because he doesn't
>> accept your operationalizations.
>>
>> But if we want "to talk TO each other (not only PAST each other)", as
>> Martin writes, it would be good to have what other fields call "standards
>> of empirical research". We have copied a lot of statistical methods from
>> fields such as the social sciences and biology. I think it would also be
>> beneficial to take a look at their standards at the "lower" level -- for
>> instances, wrt how data is gathered, processed and classified, how
>> hypotheses are operationalized, etc., to make sure that the results
>> obtained by somebody are also accepted by others (just think of the
>> 5%-threshold for statistical significance, which is just a matter of
>> convention).
>>
>> I'm aware that this type of remark is annoying for some of you. I teach
>> both corpus linguistics and typology. In corpus linguistics our students
>> deal with very basic questions of empirical research -- like the
>> traditional 'quality criteria' -- e.g. (external, internal) validity,
>> objectivity, reliability -- and then, in typology, we read important
>> publications by major authorities of the field where these criteria are
>> simply not applied, sometimes the statistics are faulty, and students do
>> enquire about this. What can I say? There are no research standards in
>> typology? There is an ongoing discussion about
>> "arbitrary/subjective/random/disjunctive comparative concepts" on the
>> Lingtype-list? I'm afraid it wouldn't convince them. What I say is that
>> typology still has some way to go to in terms of research methods. There
>> are many non-trivial problems, as we have seen in various discussions on
>> this list, and we should be aware that linguistic data is sui generis (for
>> instance, I think we can't adopt just any method/software package from
>> genetics). But we shouldn't use "authority" as a criterion in our
>> methodological choices, and the choices shouldn't be made in such a way to
>> legitimize our own research 'ex post'.
>>
>> Volker
>>
>> Am 18.11.2017 um 07:36 schrieb 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> on behalf of
>> Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
>> Date: Thursday, November 16, 2017 at 7:14 PM
>> To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <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> on behalf of
>> Martin Haspelmath <haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
>> Date: Sunday, November 12, 2017 at 10:47 PM
>> To: "lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org" <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)
>> 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)
>> 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
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Lingtyp mailing listLingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.orghttp://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>>
>>
>> --
>> Prof. Volker Gast
>> English and American Studies
>> Ernst-Abbe-PLatz 8
>> D-07743 Jena
>>
>> Fon: ++49 3641 9-44546
>> Fax: ++49 3641 9-44542
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Lingtyp mailing list
>> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
>> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>>
>>
>
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