[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Mon Nov 29 05:15:42 UTC 2021

Hi Martin,
> 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.

In Taiwan now it is common to add spaces in newspaper headlines, usually between topic and comment, but often between phrases. Attached is one example, with the relevant parts marked in yellow. These are all topic-comment examples.

Randy
——
Professor Randy J. LaPolla（罗仁地), PhD FAHA 
Center for Language Sciences
Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities and Social Sciences
Beijing Normal University, Zhuhai Campus
A302, Muduo Building, #18 Jinfeng Road, Zhuhai City, Guangdong, China

邮编：519000
广东省珠海市唐家湾镇金凤路18号木铎楼A302
北京师范大学珠海校区
人文和社会科学高等研究院
语言科学研究中心 

> On 29 Nov 2021, at 12:28 AM, Martin Haspelmath <martin_haspelmath at eva.mpg.de> wrote:
> 
> 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-maticaoriginally 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> <mailto: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 <mailto: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 list
>> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
>> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp>
> 
> -- 
> 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/ <https://www.eva.mpg.de/linguistic-and-cultural-evolution/staff/martin-haspelmath/>_______________________________________________
> Lingtyp mailing list
> Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org <mailto:Lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org>
> http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/mailman/listinfo/lingtyp>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20211129/9cac79a4/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Taiwan newspaper.pdf
Type: application/pdf
Size: 154182 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20211129/9cac79a4/attachment.pdf>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lingtyp/attachments/20211129/9cac79a4/attachment-0001.htm>