[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Fri Nov 26 11:07:18 UTC 2021

Think about the English prefix faux, written as a separate word, but with
no wordhood status.

-Mark

On Fri, 26 Nov 2021 at 22:02, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de> wrote:

> 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> <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
>
>
>
> *Disclaimer:*
>
> *This message (including any attachments) contains confidential
> information intended for a specific individual and purpose. If you are not
> the intended recipient, you should delete this message and notify the
> sender and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (the University)
> immediately. Any disclosure, copying, or distribution of this message, or
> the taking of any action based on it, is strictly prohibited and may be
> unlawful.*
>
> *The University specifically denies any responsibility for the accuracy or
> quality of information obtained through University E-mail Facilities. Any
> views and opinions expressed are only those of the author(s) and do not
> necessarily represent those of the University and the University accepts no
> liability whatsoever for any losses or damages incurred or caused to any
> party as a result of the use of such information.*
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing listLingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.orghttp://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
> --
> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20211126/79f59da6/attachment.htm>