[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Fri Nov 26 15:57:45 UTC 2021

Dear Jess, Ian, et al. — Many languages seem to have one or more expressions that can be used for speech events of arbitrary length and also for the reified “things said” during such events. The question then becomes how commonly such expressions are used for words. 

The broader question here seems to be this: under what conditions (and how commonly) do cultural communities conceptualize wordhood (whether autochthonously or by adopting the concept from a community they are in contact with)?

As Ian’s post makes clear, we shouldn’t assume that the advent of writing necessarily leads to conceptualizations of wordhood. 

It doesn’t seem farfetched to assume that the structure of the language plays a role here. After all, the importance of wordhood for the grammatical system of a language varies itself enormously from language to language.

For instance, a native grammaticographic tradition might require the recognition of a word level for the description of certain morphological processes - if the language in question possesses such processes. Such a tradition could itself be tied to the development of writing, but doesn’t have to, as the case of Pānini’s Sanskrit grammar shows.

An independent route to conceptualizations of wordhood might be a practical need for reference to conventional units of meaning. Such a need might arise in the context of certain metapragmatic practices. 

For example, there might be types of contact situations that involve a steady influx of late L2 learners with enough power/prestige to warrant the development of didactic practices. 

I could also imagine politeness practices that involve word tabus (or more broadly explicit register restrictions) around which metapragmatic discourses would evolve. 

But, again, whether a community’s metapragmatic lexicon includes a word-level unit would presumably depend in part on the structure of the language. Depending on the structure, conventional units of meaning might be most readily identified at the morpheme level or at a level of multi-morphemic units that transcends the word level as morphologically or morphophonologically defined. 

Best — Juergen

> On Nov 26, 2021, at 9:05 AM, Jess Tauber <tetrahedralpt at gmail.com> wrote:
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> Yahgan (genetic isolate from Tierra del Fuego, currently critically endangered) had several terms for 'word'.  ku:ta:na (colon marks tenseness of vowel preceding it) meant 'Language, speech, saying, word, a discourse', but as a verb also meant 'to speak, to say, utter, pronounce, to talk, preach, harangue'.  Then the related simplex, listed as gu:ta, means 'language, speech, word, pronounceable word'.  Ha:sha (sh voiceless hushing fricative) 'voice, language, uttered words, speech. Breath(ing). Cry, utterance'.  bvma;na (v schwa) 'to mention, speak of, to speak of one's intentions, wishes'. and 'to say, speak, detail, give an account of any plan. To bray, as penguins'.   As noun- 'language, conversation, talk, gossip'.  Wa:pa(n) 'a name, a word'.  Note also ya:pi:mata 'to talk, chat, speak, converse, to talk with or to', and ya:pis/ya:pvs 'talkative, noisy, given to gossip, forward with talk'. Yau(i)s (probably etymologically related to ya:pis) 'false, deceitful, a lie, (given to) lying'.  Ya:si:ta 'noisy, talkative, forward of speech, given to gossip, false tongued' (-ta is an adjective suffix referring to some proclivity).  Also likely related etymologically to ya:pis, yauis.  Note that the language exhibits a strong tendency towards 'bipartite constructions' (though here it's more 'tripartite', with some instrumental/manner-of-action/body part prefix on the verb, followed by the main verb (which can be serialized), and finally position/pathway suffixes. ya- refers to the mouth or leading edge of something, and is found in a good number of complexes referring to talking or eating.  Si:ta 'Talkative, given to chat, communicative'. Likely related to ya:si:ta.   Finally chis 'news, especially of murder or death. Intelligence of importance. Speech, harangue, hubbub, turmoil of voices in quarrels, language'. 
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> On Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 8:10 AM Haig, Geoffrey <geoffrey.haig at uni-bamberg.de> wrote:
> Here’s another reference on conceptualizations of ‘wordhood’, from a language documentation perspective:
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> Peterson, John. 2011.  "Words" in Kharia - Phonological, morpho-syntactic, and “orthographical” aspects. Geoffrey L.J. Haig, Nicole Nau, Stefan Schnell & Claudia Wegener (eds.), Documenting Endangered Languages. Achievements and Perspectives. Berlin / Boston: De Gruyter Mouton (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 240). 89-119.
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> Von: Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> Im Auftrag von JOO, Ian [Student]
> Gesendet: Freitag, 26. November 2021 11:54
> An: lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> Betreff: Re: [Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”
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> 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.
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> 
> Regards,
> 
> Ian
> 
> On 26 Nov 2021, 6:45 PM +0800, David Gil <gil at shh.mpg.de>, wrote:
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> 
> 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?
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> 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.
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> (BTW, in Riau and many other dialects of Indonesian, the word for 'word', kata, also means 'say'.)
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> David
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> 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.
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> On 26/11/2021 12:11, Nikolaus P Himmelmann wrote:
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> Hi
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> On 26/11/2021 10:17, JOO, Ian [Student] wrote:
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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> Best
> 
> Nikolaus
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> --  
> David Gil
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