[Lingtyp] history of linguistics: phonological word

Bohnemeyer, Juergen jb77 at buffalo.edu
Mon Jan 21 21:03:05 UTC 2019


I was also thinking Pike. Turns out I was wrong. Pike (1952: 110) cites a definition of the term by Hockett:

Kenneth L. Pike (1952) More on Grammatical Prerequisites, WORD, 8:2, 106-121, DOI: 10.1080/00437956.1952.11659425

https://tinyurl.com/ycm8nntc

Unfortunately, I’m not able make sense of the system Pike uses for attribution in that article, so I can’t say what paper of Hockett’s he’s citing ;-) I’m sure we have people on this list who have some familiarity with structuralist era citation conventions…

Note also that Hockett’s definition is super-simple and super-general and doesn’t necessarily capture what I was taught to think of as the essence of the phonological word, namely, that it encompasses clitics and their hosts:

> But it is also possible to define a PHONOLOGICAL WORD: any stretch of phonemes which occurs as a whole utterance, and which cannot be broken into two or more shorter stretches which also so occur, quite regardless of meanings.

This seems to presuppose a very technical definition of ‘utterance’ that isn’t immediately obvious to me. 

I think what we’re seeing here may be an example of a more general phenomenon of terminological evolution: terms (labels) and concepts travel somewhat independently through time, bump into one another at certain points in time, stick together for a while, and then possibly break up again. 

Best — Juergen



> On Jan 21, 2019, at 3:02 PM, Larry M. HYMAN <hyman at berkeley.edu> wrote:
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> Not sure if everyone was similarly influenced, but this confirms my belief that Kenneth Pike either originated or was the most consistent proponent not only of the phonological word but of the phonological hierarchy subsequently adopted by others. See for example the following article which focuses on the phonological word in Otomí. Although later than those cited by Matthew (1968) refers back to Pike in footnote 3 (p.77):
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> "The hierarchical concept untilized in the present discussion is based upon Kenneth Pike's theory (1954-60)."
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> Wallis, Ethel E. 1968. The word and the phonological hierarchy of Mezquital Otomí. Language 44.76-90.
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> Pike, Kenneth L. 1954 (vol. 1), 1955 (vol.2), 1960 (vol.3). Language in relation to a unified theory of the structure of human behavior Glendale: Summer Institute of Linguistics.
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> I haven't gone back to check these works (or the Mouton book that came out a little later), but I suspect the winning lower bid is 1954, at least thus far.
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> On Mon, Jan 21, 2019 at 11:47 AM Dryer, Matthew <dryer at buffalo.edu> wrote:
> The three earliest uses of the expression phonological word that I am aware of are in
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> Healey, Alan. (1964) The Ok Language Family in New Guinea. Australian National University doctoral dissertation.
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> “There is a close, but
> not perfect, correlation between the phonological and grammatical word.”
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> (Miller, Wick R. (1965) Acoma grammar and texts (University of California Publications in Linguistics 40). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.)
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> “The phonological word has a stronger decrescendo of speed and intensity, and sometimes of pitch than does the stress group. In slow speech the phonological word usually corresponds with a grammatical word so that their decrescendos overlap, but in fast speech several stress groups with their included, mild decrescendos”
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> (Eastman, Elizabeth & Robert Eastman. (1963) Iquito syntax. In Studies in Peruvian Indian Languages 1, 145-192. Summer Institute of Linguistics.)
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> Matthew
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> From: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> on behalf of TasakuTsunoda <tasakutsunoda at nifty.com>
> Date: Monday, January 21, 2019 at 2:11 AM
> To: Adam James Ross Tallman <ajrtallman at utexas.edu>, "LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org" <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> Subject: Re: [Lingtyp] history of linguistics: phonological word
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> Dear Adam,
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>     Please see the following book:
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>         Lyons, John. 1968. Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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> Pp68-70 have the following subsection:
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>         2.2.11 Grammatical and phonological words
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> Best wishes,
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> Tasaku Tsunoda
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> 送信元: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> (Adam James Ross Tallman <ajrtallman at utexas.edu> の代理)
> 日付: 2019年1月20日日曜日 7:44
> 宛先: <LINGTYP at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> 件名: [Lingtyp] history of linguistics: phonological word
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> Hello everyone,
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> I'm trying to trace the roots of the development of the concept of "phonological word". Does anyone know who first used this term? The earliest I can find is Dixon's (1977) grammar of Yidin. What about "prosodic word"?
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> I'm aware that the roots of the idea can be found much earlier than when the concept was first mentioned, but I'm interested in the implicit analogy between a morphosyntactic constituency and phonological constituency and how, when and why that entered linguistics.
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> Any help would be appreciated.
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> best,
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> Adam
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> --
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> Adam J.R. Tallman
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> Investigador del Museo de Etnografía y Folklore, la Paz
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> 
> -- 
> Larry M. Hyman, Professor of Linguistics & Executive Director, France-Berkeley Fund
> Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley
> http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/people/person_detail.php?person=19
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