[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Fri Nov 26 10:54:11 UTC 2021

Dear David,

thank you for introducing your interesting paper which I’ll have a look into soon.
But, I don’t think speakers not employing spaces necessarily indicates the absence of wordhood.
In many traditional orthographies, there are no spaces at all: Thai, Tibetan, Khmer, Japanese, pre-modern Korean, etc.
But that wouldn’t necessarily mean that Thai speakers don’t perceive words.
Many orthographies only transcribe consonants - but that wouldn’t mean that the speakers don’t perceive vowels as phonological units.
So I think the emergence of spaces is sufficient, but not necessary, evidence of wordhood.

Regards,
Ian
On 26 Nov 2021, 6:45 PM +0800, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de>, wrote:
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
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