Re: Word boundaries
| From: | dirk elzinga <dirk.elzinga@...> |
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| Date: | Friday, August 25, 2000, 16:57 |
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On Fri, 25 Aug 2000, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> I'm just been thinking... how "real" or how artificial are word
> boundaries? Especially for languages that don't have word boundaries in
> their (original) writing systems. Why must we treat every language
> (nat/conlang) as if they have units called "words"?
There are several answers to the question, "What is a word?"; for
professional reasons (I'm a phonologist), I usually use prosodic or
phonological criteria for defining words. Accordingly, a word may be
defined as the domain of primary stress placement or of sandhi
processes.
A syntactician will define words differently and may talk about units
which are manipulated in phrase and sentence construction. This will
overlap with a prosodic definition, but it won't be coextensive with
it.
You also have native speakers' intuitions about words, which should
not be ignored.
Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
dirk.elzinga@m.cc.utah.edu