[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

[David Gil]

Following on Nikolaus' comment, it is also an experiment that is 
performed whenever speakers of an unwritten language decide to introduce 
an orthography for the first time:  Do they insert spaces, and if so where?

I wrote about about this in Gil (2020), with reference to a naturalistic 
corpus of SMS messages in Riau Indonesian, produced in 2003, which was 
the year everybody in the village I was staying in got their first 
mobile phones and suddenly had to figure out how to write their 
language.  In the 2020 article, my focus was more on the presence or 
absence of evidence for bound morphology, and less on whether they 
introduce spaces in the first case. What I did not mention there, but 
which is most germane to Ian's query, is the latter question, whether 
they use spaces at all.  In fact, my corpus contains lots of messages 
that were written without spaces at all.  Within a couple of years the 
orthography became more conventionalized, and everybody started using 
spaces, but to begin with, at least, it seemed like many speakers were 
not entertaining any (meta-)linguistic notion of 'word' whatsoever.

(BTW, in Riau and many other dialects of Indonesian, the word for 
'word', /kata/, also means 'say'.)

David

Gil, David (2020) "What Does It Mean to Be an Isolating Language? The 
Case of Riau Indonesian", in D. Gil and A. Schapper eds., /Austronesian 
Undressed: How and Why Languages Become Isolating/, John Benjamins, 
Amsterdam, 9-96.



On 26/11/2021 12:11, Nikolaus P Himmelmann wrote:

> 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
>


-- 
David Gil

Senior Scientist (Associate)
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6, Leipzig, 04103, Germany

Email:gil at shh.mpg.de
Mobile Phone (Israel): +972-526117713
Mobile Phone (Indonesia): +62-81344082091
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