[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Sun Nov 28 16:28:42 UTC 2021

This is a really interesting thread! It still seems to me that the term 
"word" has a well-understood orthographic sense, but no well-understood 
general phonological or morphosyntactic sense. Writing is now almost 
universal, but it does appear that most unwritten languages did not have 
a word for 'word' (as opposed to 'speech' or 'what someone said').

I agree with Ian that "the emergence of spaces is sufficient evidence of 
wordhood", in the sense of orthographic wordhood – because spaces define 
orthographic words.

As the fascinating discussion of the history of reading has made clear, 
reading is by no means a straightforward or natural activity. It's more 
like riding a bike – extremely useful, but dependent on highly specific 
cultural traditions and practices.

It may well be that orthographic spaces are primarily an autonomous 
device to facilitate reading, like punctuation, paragraphs, section 
headings, and typographical ascenders/descenders in Latin script – but 
with no direct relationship to anything in the spoken language. As our 
grammatical investigations began with written language (/gram-matica/ 
originally means 'study of writing', cf. /graph-/ 'write'), it is 
natural that it was based on the study of written language. /Sciptio 
continua/ may simply be a bit harder to read than spaced writing (just 
as I find Cyrillic a bit harder to read than Latin, because there are 
fewer ascenders/descenders).

So I'm not sure if we can presuppose that spaces between words tell us 
anything about non-written language structure.

Best,
Martin

Am 26.11.21 um 11:54 schrieb JOO, Ian [Student]:
> 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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Martin Haspelmath
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
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