Talk:Polysynthetic language
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Re: je ne me le lui suis pas?
Is this really a correct French sentence? If it is, can somebody tell me what it is supposed to mean in English? (See also: Talk:Clitic) D.D. 20:09 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)
- This, and the one on the clitic article, seems to be a made up example using as many pronouns as possible. I guess it means "I am not myself it to him"? Like the clitic one, I'm not sure it's supposed to make sense. And although I'm not a professional linguist or anything, I did take some linguistics classes for fun in university, and I have never heard of French being considered polysynthetic. If you look it up on Google, there are some hits, but not many... Adam Bishop 20:58 28 Jun 2003 (UTC)
- Yes, the allegedly French phrase is gibberish. --Zoicon5
- I've changed it to je ne le sais pas, which is enough to make the point. It is valid that French can be considered structurally parallel to Bantu in this regard. I've also drawn a distinction between synthetic and polysynthetic. Normally polysynthetic would be taken to mean incorporating, as in Mohawk or Chukchee, not just heavily synthetic, but I've left that other possibility opne. - Gritchka 18:02 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)
Telpuilgoc
Telpuilgoc has no hits on Google. If an example of an artificial language is required there are much better ones. DJ Clayworth 21:46, 7 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Reply to Gritchka:
- Polysynthetic does not necessarily entail incorporation. English has a limited amount of incorporation (in noun compounding), but it is not really polysynthetic. Polysynthetic simply refers to the word to morpheme ratio or the degree of synthesis, i.e. polysynthetic means a large amount of morphemes per word. A nice summary is in Comrie (1989).
Ish ishwar 06:41, 24 Nov 2004 (UTC)
Sapir
Comment: This usage of the term polysynthetic must have originated earlier as it is used in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World, serialized, then published, in 1912. See Chapter VIII, PP 15-16, Challenger's and Summerlee's discussion of the local tribes. Perhaps someone can correct the information on the origin of the term.
- Wilhelm von Humboldt (1836) established a morphological typology with 4 language types (more or less):
- isolating
- agglutinating
- fusional
- polysynthetic (i.e. embodying)
- Sapir (1921) pointed out the problems of a classification such as this and instead proposed that languages should be classified according to 2 parameters:
- synthesis
- technique (similar to fusion)
- The term polysynthesis was first used in a linguistic sense by Pierre-Etienne Du Ponceau (a.k.a. Peter Stephen Duponceau) in 1819 (borrowed from chemistry terminology).
- Cheers! - Ish ishwar 22:02, 2005 Feb 5 (UTC)
So what's the point?
Isn't the boundary between words completely arbitrary? Doesn't "Chukchi is a polysynthetic language" really just mean "We/Chukchi speakers have chosen to write Chukchi with a low word-to-morpheme ratio"? The Chukchi "word" quoted in the article is basically a sentence with no spaces. If so, the definition given in the article (and, presumably, everywhere else) completely misses the point. Simetrical 04:47, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- No. Generally the boundary between words is not arbitrary. But, let's be sure that we are speaking of the same "boundary".
- You seem to be speaking of an orthographic word, which would be a word that is written in a given writing system, perhaps using an alphabet or a syllabary. In English and other languages there is a convention to separate orthographic words with spaces. Here I will give you that there is a bit of arbitrariness in things like compounds (which may be written as (1) two orthographic words, (2) two words with a hyphen between them, or (3) two words separated by spaces), etc. Other writing systems do not use this convention of using spaces.
- What is discussed in the article is not an orthographic word, but is rather a linguistic word, which may or may not correspond to the orthographic word. We should expect to find some correspondence between the two and also some differences. A linguistic word could perhaps be defined as the sequence of sounds found in a particular utterance in a given human context and which functions as a unit. More abstractly, we also might want to consider a word to be the abstract unit in our mind that is realized as a particular sequence of sounds (we might also want to distinguish between a lexeme and word-forms). So, this word is a different thing from an orthographic word.
- Of course, there are different units in language, like morphemes, phrases, "sentences", etc., so we will need to clarify the above definition. A word is classically defined as a minimal potentially-free linguistic unit.
- The boundaries of words can be determined by a few different criteria—for instance, syntactic, morphological, phonological, and/or psycholinguistic criteria. The syntactic and morphological criteria are perhaps the most convincing. For example, if we have an English sentence like Wilhelm kicked the carrot, by using syntactic tests we can state that kicked is a single word and not two words kick and ed. Another famous example is nitrate /najtret/ vs. night rate /najt + ret/, there are phonetic differences between these two words due to nitrate being one word & night rate being two (different phonological processes occur within words & at word boundaries). A psychological argument would come from speakers whose language had no writing system—most speakers seem to be able to sense what words are and extract them from a piece of spoken discourse.
- But, this is just a general explanation. Your question is a very important question. It is hard to create a definition of word that can be used usefully in all languages. There are some cases where it is hard to determine if a particular linguistic chunk is a word or something bigger or smaller. This has been discussed a lot in the literature.
- I am the one who provided the examples in the article. They are taken from some famous books on linguistics. I dont personally know these languages so I cant comment on them. But, I believe that there was some linguistic analysis of these words that led these linguists to consider them to be words and not something else like a sentence (even though they must be translated as sentences in English).
- Maybe someone else can clarify further what I have written. I hope I have been clear. - Ish ishwar 07:44, 2005 Jan 30 (UTC)
- You write,
- For example, if we have an English sentence like Wilhelm kicked the carrot, by using syntactic tests we can state that kicked is a single word and not two words kick and ed.
- What "syntactic tests" would these be? Also,
- But, I believe that there was some linguistic analysis of these words that led these linguists to consider them to be words and not something else like a sentence (even though they must be translated as sentences in English).
- Surely the idea of an encyclopedia article is to explain a concept. If we're to have an article on this topic, the ideas behind the definition of a word need to be explained—if not here, then perhaps at word, with a link from here (and a pointer to the fact that the definition is important). Actually, it looks to me like—astonishingly—there is no article for a linguistic word. I'll go create a stub now. —Simetrical (talk) 23:54, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Stub created at word (linguistics). —Simetrical (talk) 00:09, 31 Jan 2005 (UTC)
syntactic constituent tests
Hi.
There are many syntactic tests that are used for different things. Many are used to determine constituent structure. A word is basically the smallest syntactic constituent. Higher level constituents include phrases and sentences. Since words are syntactic constituents, we can use these kinds of tests to determine what the words are in a given sentence.
One type of test is WH-substitution (WH- indicates WH-words which are traditionally called interrogative pronouns: what, who, where, etc.). Applied to our example Wilhelm kicked the carrot, we can get:
- who kicked the carrot
- Wilhelm kicked what
- Wilhelm did what to the carrot
- Wilhelm did what
We can substitute who for Wilhelm, what for the carrot, and did what to for kicked. We can also substitute did what for the whole verb phrase kicked the carrot.
But we cannot substitute a WH-word/phrase for only kick or ed:
- ?*Wilhelm what ed the carrot
- *Wilhelm kick what the carrot
(note * = ungrammatical; ?* = ungrammatical, but maybe some people will accept)
Another test is pseudo-cleft constructions:
- Wilhem is who kicked the carrot
- the carrot is what Wilhelm kicked
- kicked the carrot is what Wilhelm did
- kick is what Wilhelm did to the carrot
- *ed is what Wilhelm kick the carrot
In our pseudo-cleft test, it seems that we can extract kick out of kicked and pseudocleft it, but we cannot pseudocleft ed.
Another issue is that we can imagine situations where a person could utter as one word response the following:
- "Wilhelm?"
- "the carrot?"
- "kicked?"
- "kick?"
- "kicked the carrot?"
But, it is impossible to have as a one word response:
- *"ed?"
So, these tests mentioned above plus many other tests seem to indicate that -ed is not a word, but an affix bound to kick. This is determined by virtue of their different syntactic behaviors. It also seems that kicked is word even though it is composed of two different morphemes.
Note that we could also apply tests to the. If we did so, we might conclude that the is not really a word either but something similar to an affix. Because the does not behave like a true word, it called a clitic (a clitic is sorta like an affix that is affixed to phrases instead of word forms).
Getting back to polysynthesis, in polysynthetic languages the affixes that make up a given polysynthetic word are often cannot be moved around in different syntactic constructions. Words usually can be moved around, but not affixes.
noun incorporation
In some languages lexical items can occur as words and can also occur as affixed elements within other words. (Note that incorporation often is present in polysynthetic languages but it is not always present and incorporation is present in non-polysyth. langs. But this point is still relevent to your question of whether a particular thing is a word or not.)
Here is an example of two sentences in Lakhota with and without noun incorporation (i.e. the noun is incorporated into the verb):
| (1) | wičháša | ki | čą́ | ki | kaksáhe | |
| man | the | wood | the | chopping | ||
| 'the man is chopping the wood' | ||||||
| (2) | wičháša | ki | čą-kaksáhe | ||
| man | the | wood-chopping | |||
| 'the man is woodchopping' | (Van Valin & LaPolla:1997 in Haspelmath:2002) | ||||
In sentence (1) the word 'wood' can occur with the determiner 'the'. When incorporated in (2), 'wood' is prefixed without 'the' and incorporating 'the' into the verb is impossible. Thus the element 'wood' in both sentences has different syntactic behaviors and different semantic readings (definite/specific vs. indefinite/generic) depending whether it occurs as a word or as a bound morpheme.
You can compare this to English babysit. This is a single word with baby incorporated into sit. You cant modify baby with a bunch of stuff when it is a part of babysit.
- I babysat for Bilbo yesterday.
- *I a very big and plumb baby sat for Bilbo yesterday.
- *I two babies sat for Bilbo yesterday.
Usually, baby acts like a normal noun and it can be modified with an indefinite article and/or adjectives and made plural, but in babysit it behaves differently.
References:
- Haspelmath, Martin. (2002). Understanding morphology. London: Arnold (co-published by Oxford University Press). ISBN 0-340-76025-7 (hb); ISBN 0-340-76206-5 (pbk).
- Van Valin, Robert D.; & LaPolla, Randy. (1997). Syntax: Structure, meaning and function. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hopefully, this makes sense. If not, just ask for clarification. Peace. - Ish ishwar 09:00, 2005 Feb 5 (UTC)
