[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Fri Nov 26 10:11:09 UTC 2021

Hi

On 26/11/2021 10:17, JOO, Ian [Student] wrote:
>
> 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.

Yes, indeed. And it is an experiment, though largely uncontrolled, that 
is carried out whenever someone carries out fieldwork on an undocumented 
lect. In this context, speakers provide evidence for word units in two 
ways: a) in elicitation when prompted by pointing or with a word from a 
contact language; b) when chunking a recording into chunks that can be 
written down by the researcher.

In my experience, speakers across a given community are pretty 
consistent in both activities though one may distinguish two basic types 
speakers. One group provides word-like units, so when you ask for 
"stone" you get a minimal form for stone. The other primarily provides 
utterance-like units. So you do not get "stone" but rather "look at this 
stone", "how big the stone is", "stones for building ovens" or the like.

Depending on the language, there is some variation in the units provided 
in both activities but this is typically restricted to the kind of 
phenomena that later on cause the main problems in the analytical 
reconstruction of a word unit, i.e. mostly phenomena that come under the 
broad term of "clitics". In my view, one should clearly distinguish 
between these analytical reconstructions, which are basic building 
blocks of grammatial descriptions, and the "natural" units provided by 
speakers, which are primary data providing the basis for the description.

Best

Nikolaus

>
> 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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>> --
>> Martin Haspelmath
>> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
>> Deutscher Platz 6
>> D-04103 Leipzig
>> https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
>
>
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