[Lingtyp] R: Folk definition of “word”

[Chao Li]

Ian wrote, "I would like to examine whether wordhood is a psychological
reality shared by speakers of different languages." As far as Chinese is
concerned, there appears to be good reasons to believe that the word has
its psychological reality in Chinese speakers' minds even though Chinese
orthography does not separate words. One piece of important evidence comes
from disyllabic forms that are represented and processed as gestalt units
in speakers' minds (for experimental evidence, see, for example,  Taft &
Zhu 1997 and Zhou & Marslen-Wilson 1994, 1995; also, it is worth nothing
that the experimenters' notion of "compound" is broad in scope and is not
limited to those cases of two or more existing words together forming
another word).

(1)   a. 衬衣 chènyī ‘shirt’        b. 手机 shǒujī ‘cell phone’
       c. 月亮 yuèliang ‘moon’    d. 长城 Chángchéng ‘the Great Wall’
       e. 明天 míngtiān ‘tomorrow’       f. 聚会 jùhuì ‘gathering’
       g. 调查diàochá ‘to investigate’   h. 庆祝qìngzhù ‘to celebrate’
        i. 高兴gāoxìng ‘happy’               j. 漂亮 piàoliang ‘pretty,
beautiful’

Taft, Marcus & Xiaoping Zhu. 1997. Using masked priming to examine lexical
storage of Chinese compound words. In Hsuan-Chih Chen (ed.), *Cognitive
Processing of Chinese and Related Asian Languages*, 233-242. Hong Kong:
Chinese University Press.

Zhou, Xiaolin & William Marslen-Wilson. 1994. Words, morphemes and
syllables in the Chinese mental lexicon. *Language and Cognitive Processes*
9(3): 393-422.

Zhou, Xiaolin & William Marslen-Wilson. 1995. Morphological structure in
the Chinese mental lexicon. *Language and Cognitive Processes* 10(6):
545-600.

Best regards,
Chao


On Mon, Nov 29, 2021 at 6:46 AM Elisa Roma <frisella at iol.it> wrote:

> Dear Colleagues,
>
> thank you very much for this interesting discussion.
>
> I would like to add a reference about the European writing and
> word-division tradition, a paper which deals with measures of spaces in
> medieval manuscripts:
>
>
>
> Bronner, Dagmar, Busch, Nathanael, Fleischer, Jürg and Poppe, Erich.
> "(Non-)separation of words in early medieval Irish and German manuscripts
> and the concept “word”". *Empirical Approaches to the Phonological
> Structure of Words*, edited by Christiane Ulbrich, Alexander Werth and
> Richard Wiese, Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 45-70.
> https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110542899-003
>
>
>
> On a different issue, in order to explain to my students how, broadly
> speaking, the abjad writing system works, I have tried to write Italian
> sentences omitting grammatical morphemes (which may be word-final vowels,
> for example) and the result is in many cases comprehensible to a native
> speaker (while it would hardly if omitting vowels altogether). This
> exercise (writing one’s own language using a different writing system or a
> given convention) could perhaps also a be a useful experiment, albeit not
> simple to pursue, with speakers, readers and writers of different
> languages. It would probably tell more about writing and reading than about
> wordhood, though, as in the case of written borrowings. The issue of the
> separation of units is also very much relevant to word processors and
> spell-checkers, I suppose.
>
>
>
> All the Best,
>
> Elisa
>
>
>
> Elisa Roma
>
> Associate professor of Linguistics
>
> Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici
>
> Università di Pavia
>
> elisa.roma at unipv.it
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *Da:* Lingtyp <lingtyp-bounces at listserv.linguistlist.org> *Per conto di *David
> Gil
> *Inviato:* lunedì 29 novembre 2021 12.29
> *A:* lingtyp at listserv.linguistlist.org
> *Oggetto:* Re: [Lingtyp] Folk definition of “word”
>
>
>
> Dear all,
>
> On 29/11/2021 12:11, Guillaume Jacques wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>
>
> On a related topic, some ancient languages such as Ugaritic and Old
> Persian had word separators other than space.
>
> And some very modern languages too.  Here are some texts from my
> Indonesian SMS corpus, dating from the early 2000s, when semi-literate
> speakers began writing their colloquial varieties of Indonesian for the
> very first time, and were inventing orthographic conventions on the fly
> (Gil 2004,2020).
>
>
>
> In (1) the speaker uses a full stop for word boundaries, and a question
> mark for sentence boundaries.  In (2) the speaker uses a full stop for word
> boundaries and upper case for the beginning of the next word (though I
> suspect the latter was produced automatically by the mobile phone's texting
> software).  in (3) the speaker uses a comma for word boundaries.  And in
> (4) the speaker uses a plus sign.  What these examples show is that in
> spite of numerous deviations from the orthographic conventions of Standard
> Indonesian (many of which reflect particular phonological properties of the
> respective dialects), the speakers experienced a strong drive to represent
> word boundaries in one way or another.
>
>
>
> (1)
>
> Dapit?ini.no.mama.adi?klu.mau.kirim.pls.no.ini.ya.pit?
>
>
>
> (2)
> Pit.Sori.Yah.Pian.Antar.Teman.Nyjum.Dulu.Kasian.Ama.Dia.Yah.Pian.Kaga.Bawa.Hape.Takut.Ada.Jambret.Hp.Di.Taro.Di.Rumah.Pian.Kaga.Aptipin.Dulu.Yah.Jangan.Marah.Soalnya.Kalaw.Pian.Idupin.Kasian.Ama.Sodara.Pian.Dia.Udah.Tidur.
>
>
>
> (3)
>
>
> Terus,gimana,aku,disining,tak,mungkin,bang,rudi,menanggung,makanku,disini,sampai,kamu,sampai,dipakan,vid.bls.
>
>
>
> (4)
>
> Pit+kalao+udah+siyam+kerja+tlp+aku+ya+pit+
>
>
>
>
>
> Gil, David (2004) "Learning About Language from Your Handphone; *dan, and
> *and *&* in SMSs from the Siak River Basin", in Katharina Endriati
> Sukatmo ed., *Kolita 2, Konferensi Linguistik Tahunan Atma Jaya, *Pusat
> Kajian Bahasa dan Budaya, Unika Atma Jaya, Jakarta, 57-61.
>
> 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.
>
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> 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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