[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

[David Gil]

Ian, actually I would say that the emergence of spaces is neither 
necessary nor sufficient as evidence for wordhood:  it's not sufficient 
because orthographies make use of many conventions lacking any kind of 
grammatical reality — consider, for example, English digraphs such as 
<sh> and <th>.  Still, as argued in Gil (2020), naturalistically 
emerging orthographies *can*, albeit with caution, be used as a 
potential source of evidence for grammatical structures.

On 26/11/2021 12:54, JOO, Ian [Student] wrote:
> 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
>> 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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-- 
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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