[Lingtyp] wordhood: bonded vs. bound
Martin Haspelmath
haspelmath at shh.mpg.de
Wed Nov 22 02:48:05 UTC 2017
Thanks, Östen, for this further discussion of boundness, and for digging
into Bloomfield!
I'm not saying that Bloomfield was right, but he was the first to
propose a serious definition of "word" – so even though he failed, it's
still instructive to read him.
In any event, his "bound vs. free" distinction survived, and I think we
need it for the definition of some key concepts in typology:
– auxiliary verb vs. tense-aspect marker
– adposition vs. relational noun
– person index vs. free person pronoun
Linguists often try to define grammatical elements in terms of their
"grammatical" meanings, but it seems to me that a grammatical marker in
general is best defined as "an element that cannot occur in isolation".
(Of course, this is paradigmatic in the sense that it relies on
"trans-utterance equivalence", but this applies to every concept in
grammar, as far as I can see.)
The nice thing about Bloomfield's "bound vs. free" distinction is that
it's a single criterion (rather than a battery of criteria, so that the
issue of disjunctive definitions doesn't apply), and that it's
universally applocable, because all languages have free forms and bound
forms (of course with some questionable cases in the middle, as is
always the case).
The term "bound" is also often used in a phonological sense
("phonologically bound"), but there are many different ways in which
this can be interpreted, so I find the Bloomfieldian sense much more
readily applicable.
(Strangely, I often read linguists talk about "bound morphology", or
"bound affixes" – I wonder whether this means anything, or whether it's
just sloppy usage.)
Best,
Martin
On 18.11.17 18:31, Östen Dahl wrote:
>
> I want to comment on the notion of "boundness", in particular in its
> Bloomfieldian version. Matthew has already expressed some doubts about
> the applicability of this notion, and I was thinking of some further
> problems -- then I went to the source (Bloomfield's Language from
> 1933) and found that (perhaps not unexpectedly) Bloomfield had already
> considered those problems. In fact, in addition to the definition on
> p. 160, he devotes at least seven pages to discussing them (177-184).
> But the way he does so does not really solve the problems with his
> definitions, they rather confound them even more.
>
> The definitions of "bound" and "free" given on p. 160 are clear
> enough: "A linguistic form which is never spoken alone is a *bound*
> form; all others (as, for instance, *John ran* or *John* or *run* or
> *running*) are *free* forms." Furthermore, we learn on p. 178 that a
> word is a "minimum free form", i.e. a free form which does not consist
> entirely of two or more lesser free forms.
>
> It is not quite clear, however, what Bloomfield really wants to say
> about boundness and wordhood. On p. 179, he says that "[i]n the case
> of many languages, it is impossible to distinguish consistently, on
> the one hand, between phrases and words and, on the other hand,
> between words and bound forms." On p. 181, he likewise notes that
> "many forms lie on the border-line between bound forms and words, or
> between words and phrases; it is impossible to make a rigid
> distinction between forms that may and forms that may not be spoken in
> absolute position". Depending on how rigid we want our distinctions to
> be, this may seem to be a more or less serious objection to the
> notions of boundness and wordhood, but I find the cases more
> problematic where Bloomfield seems to want to diss his own
> definitions. Sometimes, he says, "the general structure of a language
> may make one classification more convenient for our purpose" (179).
> Thus the English definite article *the* fills the same syntactic slot
> as the demonstratives *this* and *that*. Therefore, even if *the* only
> occurs alone in "far-fetched situations", the parallelism with the
> demonstratives, which "freely occur as sentences", "leads us to class
> *the* as a word". Another example mentioned by Bloomfield concerns
> French pronouns such as *je* and *il* which usually do not appear in
> "absolute use", but which again, due to the parallelism with strong
> forms such as *moi* and *lui*, "have the status of words" (180).
> (Bloomfield does not say if this means that they also have the status
> of free forms, but given that wordhood was previously defined in terms
> of boundness, this is a plausible inference.)
>
> What this shows is that Bloomfield had a rather pragmatic attitude to
> his notions and it is questionable if we should speak of
> "Bloomfieldian" concepts if it means that we want to be more
> Bloomfieldian than Bloomfield himself. But a question of greater
> theoretical significance is to what extent considerations of what
> Bloomfield refers to as the general structure of the language, or of
> questions regarding the optimal description of an individual language
> system, is allowed to influence the application of comparative
> concepts. Martin's work on those concepts seems to imply that there
> should be no such influence. He says (Haspelmath 2010:680f.):
> "Comparative concepts are motivated and defined in a way that is quite
> independent of linguistic categories (though of course not independent
> of the facts of languages)" and "[i]n practice, typologists do not
> generalize over the categories of languages, but over properties of
> languages that they identify regardless of the categories that
> speakers seem to have internalized and that structural analysis
> reveals". I think that what "structural analysis reveals" is precisely
> what Bloomfield was talking about.
>
> In my opinion, what is crucial here is that the Bloomfieldian
> definitions of boundness and wordhood are paradigmatic in the sense
> that they demand the consideration of more than one utterance, and
> thus involve making judgments about trans-utterance and
> trans-construction identity and equivalence. Thus, we have to make up
> our mind about whether *je* and *moi* are the same entity or not. If
> we think the answer to that question is clear, there are many similar
> cases which are tougher to decide. And the way we usually make such
> decisions is to consider what is the best way to capture the general
> structure of the language, or what "structural analysis reveals". In
> other words, Bloomfieldian boundness is dependent on
> language-particular descriptions and categories.
>
> Bloomfield, Leonard. 1933. Language,. New York: H. Holt and Company.
>
> Haspelmath, Martin. 2010. Comparative concepts and descriptive
> categories in crosslinguistic studies. Language 86(3). 663–687.
>
> *Från:* Lingtyp [mailto:lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org]
> *För *William Croft
> *Skickat:* den 18 november 2017 17:38
> *Till:* Volker Gast <volker.gast at uni-jena.de>; Linguistic Typology
> <lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> *Ämne:* Re: [Lingtyp] wordhood: bonded vs. bound
>
> Dear Volker,
>
> I think most typologists are aware that (i) defining categories for
> coding is very hard, especially across languages -- hence all the
> discussions about comparative concepts on Lingtyp (some of which have
> subsequently been published in some form in Linguistic Typology), of
> which this discussion of ‘word’ is only the latest; and (ii) that
> typologists must usually operationalize those criteria and make the
> operationalizations as explicit as possible. I think that (i) and (ii)
> are fairly common practice in typology, despite my previous comments
> about essentialism and methodological opportunism (cherry-picking of
> criteria).
>
> On the other hand, your point about mono-annotator annotation is
> well taken. Nevertheless, the operational factor is this one:
>
> And I'm not saying that mono-annotator projects are useless,
> sometimes you just don't have the manpower for multi-annotator
> projects
>
> I have recently been working on computational projects that involve
> annotation, and even there, where there is a lot more large-scale
> funding than in typology, it is very expensive to hire and train
> annotators, and in the end there are maybe two annotators and a third
> person acting as adjudicator for a pilot annotation at most. (In fact,
> most of the effort in computational linguistics is towards training
> classifiers to do the annotation automatically on large corpora, and
> in my small experience those are often worse than mono-annotator
> annotations.)
>
> In typology, there is virtually no funding for any sort of
> multi-annotator annotation whatsoever. This is especially true for
> graduate students doing typological dissertations, but also for
> faculty doing typological research. I would guess that many
> typologists are aware that multi-annotator annotation is preferable,
> but impractical. But we don’t normally add a statement like “We are
> aware that engaging multiple annotators would improve the reliability
> of our coding and hence of the results of our crosslinguistic study;
> but due to lack of funding, all annotation of the data was performed
> by the author.” Perhaps we typologists should starting adding such
> statements.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Bill
>
>
>
> On Nov 18, 2017, at 6:32 AM, Volker Gast <volker.gast at uni-jena.de
> <mailto:volker.gast at uni-jena.de>> wrote:
>
> Hi Johanna, even if I could do this diplomatically, I wouldn't,
> and I think it wouldn't make much sense, as my point is not about
> specific publications or authors; it's about common practice (and
> common practice is reflected in the publications of 'major
> authorities'). But I think I get your point; so let me be a bit
> more specific.
>
> A lot of (quantitative) typological work relies on 'coding':
> Information is extracted from grammars and transformed into a data
> matrix. Now, it is common practice (and I'm not excluding myself
> here) for the coding to be done by the analyst him/herself, and by
> no one else. But that's considered bad practice in other fields.
> Ideally, you'd need a team of annotators coding independently, on
> the basis of annotation guidelines. The team codes a sample,
> determines inter-annotator agreement, and adjusts/specifies the
> annotation guidelines where necessary. This is done until the
> inter-annotator agreement is satisfactory. And then you can start
> with the actual coding. Ideally, the analyst shouldn't be involved
> in the coding process, as her annotation decisions might be
> (subconsciously) influenced by her working hypotheses. (Note that
> this might be a viable solution to the question of how comparative
> concepts can reliably be defined, for a given study; you can just
> measure how much inter-annotator variation there is; whether or
> not the operationalizations make sense is a different question, of
> course, one of validity. When you use a set of criteria
> disjunctively, the question is what exactly your
> operationalizations are intended to represent.)
>
> Note that I'm not saying that there are no multi-annotator
> projects in typology (I'm actually involved in two such projects,
> though one of them is actually a comparative corpus linguistics
> project); but as far as I can tell, it is 'basically' comon
> practice for analysts to code the data themselves. And I'm not
> saying that mono-annotator projects are useless, sometimes you
> just don't have the manpower for multi-annotator projects (and one
> of the multi-annotator projects I'm involved in was really
> painful; but it was instructive to see that even for categories
> that we thought we had defined rather clearly, inter-annotator
> agreement was rather low in some cases). But as I said earlier, it
> would be nice to have some standards or at least general
> guidelines for coding typological data. Minimally, I think, the
> data should be published, along with at least some information on
> the operational tests that were applied, even if done by a single
> annotator.
>
> I hope this clarifies my (too general) remarks in my previous post.
> Volker
>
> Am 18.11.2017 um 13:27 schrieb Johanna NICHOLS:
>
> 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 <mailto: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
> <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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>
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>
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> --
>
> Prof. Volker Gast
>
> English and American Studies
>
> Ernst-Abbe-PLatz 8
>
> D-07743 Jena
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>
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>
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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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