[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

[Hartmut Haberland]

Cf. Florian Coulmas on words in Japanese in Jørgen Dines Johansen and Harly Sonne, eds. Pragmatics and Linguistics. Festschrift for Jacob Mey. Odense U Press 1986.
Hartmut Haberland

Den 26. nov. 2021 kl. 10.52 skrev Jocelyn Aznar <contact at jocelynaznar.eu>:

Dear everyone,

it seems that in many oceanic languages have a metalinguistic term for
wordhood phenomena. Michel Aufray, in his thesis: Les litteratures
oceaniennes, describes a recurring lexical dichotomy in Oceanic
languages between language as a social phenomena and language as a
mechanical device.

For instance, in Nisvai (Oceanic, Vanuatu, nisva1234), the word "naocin"
refers to social communications, and is used by speakers to refer to
language, news but also wordlike phenomena while "nandrlyn" refers both
to the throat and the voice. I guess looking at colexification phenomena
for this topic would be very linguistically productive.

Best,
J

Le 26/11/2021 à 09:40, Harald Hammarström a écrit :
A good, not often cited, paper on the situation in Eipo Mek not long
after contact is:

Heeschen, Volker. (1978) The metalinguistic vocabulary of a speech
community in the highlands of Irian Jaya (West New Guinea). In A.
Sinclair (ed.), The Child's Conception of Language, 155-187. Berlin:
Springer.

all the best, H

Pada tanggal Jum, 26 Nov 2021 pukul 08.45 Peter Arkadiev
<peterarkadiev at yandex.ru <mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru>> menulis:

   Dear typologists,

   thanks, Ian, this is a good question. Vladimir Alpatov discusses it
   with respect to Japanese (which has "kotoba" and different types of
   "go", none of which is equivalent to the European concept of "word")
   and some other languages both in his classic "Struktura
   grammaticheskix jedinic v sovremennom japonskom jazyke" [Structure
   of grammatical units in contemporary Japanese] (1979) and his recent
   "Slovo i chasti rechi" [Word and parts of speech] (2017). Both are
   in Russian, though, but many a typologist used to read this language.

   Best regards,

   Peter

   26.11.2021, 09:17, "JOO, Ian [Student]" <ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk
   <mailto:ian.joo at connect.polyu.hk>>:

       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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   --
   Peter Arkadiev, PhD Habil.
   Institute of Slavic Studies
   Russian Academy of Sciences
   Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119334 Moscow
   peterarkadiev at yandex.ru <mailto:peterarkadiev at yandex.ru>
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   <http://inslav.ru/people/arkadev-petr-mihaylovich-peter-arkadiev>

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