[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Sun Nov 28 04:40:25 UTC 2021

Further on this, as you suggest Ian, care has to be taken as to whether 
the 'word for “word”' is polysemous, or ranges more widely than we might 
expect.  Even English 'word' does in some contexts (as in "I took him at 
his word.")  Another relevant reference:

    Goddard, Cliff. 2011. The lexical semantics of language (with
    special reference to words). /Language Sciences/ 33.1, 40-57.
    http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2010.03.003

David


On 26/11/21 20:17, JOO, Ian [Student] wrote:
> Dear Martin,
>
> Thanks for citing this chapter.
> I did some quick search to see if it’s true that “only some” languages 
> have a word for “word”.
> For example, in the World Loanword Database, it seems that most of the 
> 41 sample languages have a word for “word”, and more than half of them 
> have a native word for it.
> https://wold.clld.org/meaning/18-26#2/32.2/-4.8 
> <https://aus01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwold.clld.org%2Fmeaning%2F18-26%232%2F32.2%2F-4.8&data=04%7C01%7Cdavid.nash%40anu.edu.au%7C0358502990c943f7416408d9b0bdac2b%7Ce37d725cab5c46249ae5f0533e486437%7C0%7C0%7C637735152318739129%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=r1JnumGj7Vd4vqWdbSjqozgFE35C10g2a%2FLBc0mJ6W4%3D&reserved=0>
> Also in the CLICS3 database, many languages seem to have one or more 
> “word”-words, although I can’t be sure if they are native or not.
> https://clics.clld.org/parameters/1599 
> <https://aus01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fclics.clld.org%2Fparameters%2F1599&data=04%7C01%7Cdavid.nash%40anu.edu.au%7C0358502990c943f7416408d9b0bdac2b%7Ce37d725cab5c46249ae5f0533e486437%7C0%7C0%7C637735152318749083%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C1000&sdata=uOeSkU9wVP5THDZ%2FXHoiij%2FhHjWJB17MPdH5W9rrOyU%3D&reserved=0>
> On the other hand, my native language, Korean, doesn’t have a 
> monomorphemic “word”-word. The common words for “word”, tan-e and 
> nath-mal, are both compounds (‘piece-speech’), and I suspect them to 
> be fairly recently coined or borrowed.
> But the real question would be whether all these words for “word” 
> designate roughly the same concept.
> In many languages, the word for “word” seems to be co-lexified with 
> “speech” (such as Latin /verbum/ or Japanese /koto-ba/).
> 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.
>
> Regards,
> Ian
> On 26 Nov 2021, 2:56 PM +0800, Martin Haspelmath 
> <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de>, wrote:
>> I felt that Dixon & Aikhenvald's (2002) introductory chapter was very 
>> interesting:
>>
>> Dixon, R. M. W & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2002. Word: A typological 
>> framework. In Dixon, R. M.W & Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. (eds.), /Word: 
>> A cross-linguistic typology/, 1–41. Cambridge: Cambridge University 
>> Press.
>>
>> Thy say (p. 2-3) that "it appears that only some languages actually 
>> have a lexeme with the meaning ‘word’... The vast majority of 
>> languages spoken by small tribal groups (with from a few hundred to a 
>> few thousand speakers) have a lexeme meaning ‘(proper) name’ but none 
>> have the meaning ‘word’."
>>
>> Even Latin does not have a single word for 'word' (there is /verbum/, 
>> /vox/, /sermo/, and /dictio/, the latter a technical calque from 
>> Greek /léxis/).
>>
>> (Dixon & Aikhenvald's 2002 paper was a major inspiration for my 2011 
>> paper on the indeterminacy of word segmentation.)
>>
>> Martin
>>
>> Am 26.11.21 um 07:16 schrieb JOO, Ian [Student]:
>>> Dear typologists,
>>>
>>> As you may know already, the concept of “word” is notoriously hard 
>>> to define.
>>> Without getting into that, is the concept of wordhood attested 
>>> cross-linguistically?
>>> In other words, do people with different language backgrounds 
>>> believe that there is such a thing as a “word”, and do what people 
>>> perceive as a “word” tend to be roughly the same concept?
>>> Which boils down to two questions:
>>>
>>>  1. Do many languages have a native, monomorphemic word for “word”?
>>>  2. If so, do these words for “word” refer to roughly the same (or,
>>>     at least, similar) concept?
>>>
>>> I would like to examine whether wordhood is a psychological reality 
>>> shared by speakers of different languages.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Ian
>>>
>>>
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>> --
>> Martin Haspelmath
>> Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
>> Deutscher Platz 6
>> D-04103 Leipzig
>> https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/
>
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