[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

[Jocelyn Aznar]

Dear everyone,

it seems that in many oceanic languages have a metalinguistic term for
wordhood phenomena. Michel Aufray, in his thesis: Les litteratures
oceaniennes, describes a recurring lexical dichotomy in Oceanic
languages between language as a social phenomena and language as a
mechanical device.

For instance, in Nisvai (Oceanic, Vanuatu, nisva1234), the word "naocin"
refers to social communications, and is used by speakers to refer to
language, news but also wordlike phenomena while "nandrlyn" refers both
to the throat and the voice. I guess looking at colexification phenomena
for this topic would be very linguistically productive.

Best,
J

Le 26/11/2021 à 09:40, Harald Hammarström a écrit :
> A good, not often cited, paper on the situation in Eipo Mek not long
> after contact is:
> 
> Heeschen, Volker. (1978) The metalinguistic vocabulary of a speech
> community in the highlands of Irian Jaya (West New Guinea). In A.
> Sinclair (ed.), The Child's Conception of Language, 155-187. Berlin:
> Springer.
> 
> all the best, H
> 
> Pada tanggal Jum, 26 Nov 2021 pukul 08.45 Peter Arkadiev
> <peterarkadiev at yandex.ru <mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru>> menulis:
> 
>     Dear typologists,
>      
>     thanks, Ian, this is a good question. Vladimir Alpatov discusses it
>     with respect to Japanese (which has "kotoba" and different types of
>     "go", none of which is equivalent to the European concept of "word")
>     and some other languages both in his classic "Struktura
>     grammaticheskix jedinic v sovremennom japonskom jazyke" [Structure
>     of grammatical units in contemporary Japanese] (1979) and his recent
>     "Slovo i chasti rechi" [Word and parts of speech] (2017). Both are
>     in Russian, though, but many a typologist used to read this language.
>      
>     Best regards,
>      
>     Peter
>      
>     26.11.2021, 09:17, "JOO, Ian [Student]" <ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk
>     <mailto:ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk>>:
> 
>         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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>      
>      
>     -- 
>     Peter Arkadiev, PhD Habil.
>     Institute of Slavic Studies
>     Russian Academy of Sciences
>     Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119334 Moscow
>     peterarkadiev at yandex.ru <mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru>
>     http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev
>     <http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev>
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