[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Fri Nov 26 09:17:07 UTC 2021

Dear Martin,

Thanks for citing this chapter.
I did some quick search to see if it’s true that “only some” languages have a word for “word”.
For example, in the World Loanword Database, it seems that most of the 41 sample languages have a word for “word”, and more than half of them have a native word for it.
https://wold.clld.org/meaning/18-26#2/32.2/-4.8
Also in the CLICS3 database, many languages seem to have one or more “word”-words, although I can’t be sure if they are native or not.
https://clics.clld.org/parameters/1599
On the other hand, my native language, Korean, doesn’t have a monomorphemic “word”-word. The common words for “word”, tan-e and nath-mal, are both compounds (‘piece-speech’), and I suspect them to be fairly recently coined or borrowed.
But the real question would be whether all these words for “word” designate roughly the same concept.
In many languages, the word for “word” seems to be co-lexified with “speech” (such as Latin verbum or Japanese koto-ba).
The question would be, when one asks a speaker of a given language to divide a sentence into words, would the number of words be consistent throughout different speakers?
It would be an interesting experiment. I’d be happy to be informed of any previous study who conducted such an experiment.

Regards,
Ian
On 26 Nov 2021, 2:56 PM +0800, Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>, wrote:
I felt that Dixon & Aikhenvald's (2002) introductory chapter was very interesting:

Dixon, R. M. W & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2002. Word: A typological framework. In Dixon, R. M.W & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (eds.), Word: A cross-linguistic typology, 1–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thy say (p. 2-3) that "it appears that only some languages actually have a lexeme with the meaning ‘word’... The vast majority of languages spoken by small tribal groups (with from a few hundred to a few thousand speakers) have a lexeme meaning ‘(proper) name’ but none have the meaning ‘word’."

Even Latin does not have a single word for 'word' (there is verbum, vox, sermo, and dictio, the latter a technical calque from Greek léxis).

(Dixon & Aikhenvald's 2002 paper was a major inspiration for my 2011 paper on the indeterminacy of word segmentation.)

Martin

Am 26.11.21 um 07:16 schrieb JOO, Ian [Student]:
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:

  1.  Do many languages have a native, monomorphemic word for “word”?
  2.  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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