[Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”

Mon Nov 29 10:31:34 UTC 2021

Dear Linguistlist-users, dear Colleagues,
For those of you who are able to read Italian I'm attaching a paper that
deals (particularly in the first part) with many points that have been
dealt with in this passionate discussion (the *scriptio continua, *loud
lecture and also punctuation).
N.B.: You have to turn up the text🤗.*...*

*Best wishes*
*Paolo*

Prof. Dr. Paolo Ramat
Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Socio corrispondente
'Academia Europaea'
'Societas Linguistica Europaea', Honorary Member
Università di Pavia (retired)
Istituto Universitario di Studi Superiori (IUSS Pavia) (retired)

piazzetta Arduino 11 - I 27100 Pavia
##39 0382 27027
347 044 98 44

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Il giorno lun 29 nov 2021 alle ore 11:13 Guillaume Jacques <
rgyalrongskad at gmail.com> ha scritto:

> Similarly, in some early sources on Algonquian languages, the person
> indexation/possessive prefixes are sometimes separated from the verb stem
> by a space, including the -t- that occurs when they precede vowel-initial
> stems:
>
> Études philologiques sur quelques langues sauvages de l'Amérique : Cuoq,
> J. A. (Jean André), 1821-1898 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming :
> Internet Archive <https://archive.org/details/bp_991175/page/47/mode/2up>
>
> I wonder if this is due to the influence of French spacing conventions, in
> particular, the fact that French orthography treats as distinct words the
> "clitic pronouns", which are synchronically best treated as indexation
> prefixes if we forget about the writing system.
>
> On a related topic, some ancient languages such as Ugaritic and Old
> Persian had word separators other than space.
>
> Guillaume
>
> Le lun. 29 nov. 2021 à 08:48, Randy J. LaPolla <randy.lapolla at gmail.com>
> a écrit :
>
>> 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
>> 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 2:22 PM, Matthew Windsor <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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>>
>>
>>
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>
>
> --
> Guillaume Jacques
>
> Directeur de recherches
> CNRS (CRLAO) - EPHE- INALCO
> https://scholar.google.fr/citations?user=1XCp2-oAAAAJ&hl=fr
> https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/295
> <http://cnrs.academia.edu/GuillaumeJacques>
> http://panchr.hypotheses.org/
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