[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Mon Nov 29 07:53:22 UTC 2021

I also would like to point out that we would have to avoid circularity when trying to define wordhood purely in terms of orthography.
Because, even in orthography, spaces are not given randomly and arbitrarily - most of the time, spaces are there for some kind of reason (be it grammatical or phonological).
Thus the circularity to be avoided is as follows:

  1.  A and B are two words because they are separated by a space.
  2.  A and B are separted by a space because they are two words.

So I think the question we have to answer is why two words are written with a space in between, even if it’s just a convention, because we need to know why that convention arose in the first place.

Regards,
Ian
On 29 Nov 2021, 3:48 PM +0800, Randy J. LaPolla <randy.lapolla at gmail.com>, wrote:
Just a brief thought I just had about “word” and spaces: In the Rawang (Tibeto-Burman, Kachin State, Myanmar) orthography, spaces are used between “words”, but the “words” are not necessarily individual grammatical words or lexical words, as they can just be combinations of affixal morphology that due to the prosody get pronounced separately from the items they actually modify and would be attached to in other prosodic contexts (e.g. the first person marker -ng (-ŋ) seen in (2) below usually is suffixed to the verb), e.g. in the following examples, the “words” in bold are combinations of grammatical morphemes, and so form phonological “words", but are not lexical items, just chunks of speech.

1. èdv́ngké bǿshà.
    è-dv́ng-ké        bǿ-shà
    N.1-finish-eat   PFV-1plpast
    ‘(They) defeated us.’

2. Tı̀ tiqgwı̀n èyok ngāng ngvtnà.
    tı̀         tiq-gwı̀n   è-yuq        ng-ā-ng        ng-vt-à
    water   one-cup   N.1-scoop 1sg-BEN-1sg  1sg-DIR+1sg-TR.PAST
   'Bring (scoop) me a cup of water.’

Btw, Rawang has a word for ‘language, speech, word, what was said’, kà, that can also be used as a classifier for units of speech, but it isn’t limited to any particular size unit.

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
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On 29 Nov 2021, at 2:22 PM, Matthew Windsor <matthew_windsor at sil.org<mailto:matthew_windsor at sil.org>> wrote:

I don't think anyone has mentioned Dixon, Aikhenvald and White's more recent (2020) volume, Phonological word and grammatical word: A cross-linguistic typology. Section four of the introduction offers some remarks defending the validity of 'word' as "a minimal pronounceable unit which makes sense to speakers."

I can also comment briefly on the Cree syllabary mentioned by Daniel, which was invented by a missionary linguist but also quickly indigenized and used by a few generations of monolingual Cree and Ojibwe speakers. There are different conventions between communities for the location of orthographic spaces. In the community where I work, Oji-Cree (Ojibwe) speakers generally keep the long grammatical words together, with optional spaces at predictable places within/after strings of 'preverbs' (prefixes with rigid ordering but which form phonological units). The spaces are inserted when a word is judged visually confusing (ᑭᑮ ᑭᑭᓑᑳᐣ) or "too long" to be easily readable.

--

Matt Windsor

Linguistics & Translation | SIL

ᐃᐦᑭᑐᐃᐧᐣ ᑮᐊᓂᔑᓂᓃᐃᐧ ᒦᓇ ᑭᑮᐃᐧᒋᐊᔮᒥᑯᓈᐣ.

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