[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

[fcosw5]

As far as I can tell, Chinese has two terms, one meaning roughly 'morpheme' and the other meaning roughly 'word'.  Part of the problem is, at least in Mandarin Chinese they are *very similar* in pronunciation!

'zi' means, more or less literally, what in English is usually referred to as a 'character' in the Hanzi writing system.  It is always a single syllable; in almost all cases, it corresponds to a single morpheme, in the more-or-less strict linguistic sense.

'ci' refers to a commonly-occurring combination of two (perhaps occasionally 3?) 'zi', which combination has a distinctive meaning, and therefore corresponds fairly closely to what we would consider a (multimorphemic) word.

'zi' is BY FAR the more commonly-used term in ordinary usage.  I have found that when I try (in *spoken* Chinese) to use 'ci', my students almost always mishear this as 'zi'.

Best,
Steven

-----Original message-----
From:JOO, Ian [Student]<ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk>
To:LINGTYP<lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
Date: Fri, 26 Nov 2021 14:16:30
Subject: [Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”
Dear typologists,

As you may know already, the concept of “word” is notoriously hard to define.
Without getting into that, is the concept of wordhood attested cross-linguistically?
In other words, do people with different language backgrounds believe that there is such a thing as a “word”, and do what people perceive as a “word” tend to be roughly the same concept?
Which boils down to two questions:
Do many languages have a native, monomorphemic word for “word”?If so, do these words for “word” refer to roughly the same (or, at least, similar) concept? 
I would like to examine whether wordhood is a psychological reality shared by speakers of different languages.

Regards, 
Ian


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