zompist wrote: ↑Tue Jul 11, 2023 3:36 am
It's a good overview, and I think he makes a good case of how difficult the "word" concept is. He notes himself that this is not a new observation. (I've discussed it myself,
e.g. here.)
Yes, indeed… I’ve often thought of Yingzi when reading in this area.
My main objection is that he's shown that the "word" concept is tricky, but not that it's meaningless. […] I'd also note that his point is sharpest when aimed at Chomskyans and at atttempts to generalize across languages. He doesn't make a good case that (say) you shouldn't have separate morphology and syntax sections in your Latin reference grammar. But outside GG, I don't think any linguists maintain that reference grammars are actually reflective of the mental structure of a language, whatever that is.
I don’t disagree with this criticism. He gets closest in the final sections, when he talks about clustering: if it could be shown that these criteria cluster in some way, that would indicate that it would be possible to define a meaningful ‘word’ concept. But no-one has come close to showing that yet… on the contrary, the article rather shows that no-one has come close to giving a sensible cross-linguistic definition for ‘word’!
Relatedly, I think ‘word’ as a concept is fine when defined language-internally. But so does he! On this point, his criticism is that if ‘word’ can only be defined language-internally, then saying ‘all languages have words’ is a uselessly vague statement. Personally, I take the view that ‘word’ is cross-linguistically meaningless until proven otherwise — just like every other term in linguistics.
He talks about fuzzy categories, but doesn't consistently apply this concept to his own examples. As just one example:
so for
example Italian has piang-eva e piang-erà [cry-PST.3SG and cry-FUT.3SG]
‘she cried and will cry’, but not *piang-eva e -erà. But it is well-known that
coordinated prefixes and suffixes are not uncommon in English and related
languages [:] pro- and anti-war
However the affix-word continuum works, these are at very different levels. I'd say that English
pro and
anti are very close to being full words already-- indeed, pro is hardly a prefix in "Are you pro or con?" This example doesn't at all demonstrate his point.
I actually don’t think you’re disagreeing with the article there. I interpret that and similar examples as illustrating that many kinds of quite different morphemes have been lumped together under the single word ‘affix’.
(There’s also the converse point: that many
similar kinds of morphemes have been called ‘words’! I think he missed out a good opportunity to demonstrate some of the supposedly ‘isolating’ languages from, say, Sino–Tibetan and Austronesian, where constructions that look like long particle strings could just as easily be analysed as single grammatical words.)
I do think the passage you originally cited is also a weak point. His claim as stated is simply wrong.
Indeed, hence why I asked about it!
I don't think uninterruptability alone can define words, and his points about agglutinative languages are a useful caveat; but it seems to me he dismisses the issue too quickly, and again doesn't take fuzzy categories into account. If there are different levels of interruptability, then he can't simply point to one level of it and conclude that uninterruptability isn't a useful criterion.
On the other hand, the mere fact that different levels of interruptability exist should suggest that by itself, ‘interruptability’ alone isn’t useful as a criterion. People have made this point more strongly with phonology: the phonological hierarchy is typically postulated to be something like ‘foot < word < phrase’, but in fact there seem to be more (or possibly less) levels than that, which don’t even necessarily line up with each other, so using them as a criterion is cross-linguistically a bit pointless. (See e.g.
https://doi.org/10.1111/lnc3.12364 — incidentally another great article on wordhood!)
Also, I don’t really understand what kinds of ‘taking fuzzy categories into account’ you’d like to see here. He’s looked at ten different criteria, and demonstrated that each is neither sufficient nor necessary to define the kinds of things which people have called ‘words’. If those criteria are themselves fuzzy or ill-defined, that just reinforces his point.
