Wordhood and phonological boundness or independence - grambank/grambank GitHub Wiki

Many features in Grambank make a distinction between morphological marking (affixation, cliticization etc.) and marking by means of independent words (particles, auxiliaries, etc.).

The difficulty to define wordhood is well-known in linguistic typology (Haspelmath 2011). For the purpose of Grambank, we have decided to work with a phonological definition: 'bound' marking or 'morphology' means 'phonologically bound'; 'non-bound marking' (e.g. with inflecting or non-inflecting words) involves markers that are phonologically free.

A morpheme is phonologically free if it occurs as a phonological word. It is phonologically bound if it does not occur as its own phonological word. Whether a morpheme is bound or not can be established by looking at one or more of the following criteria.

  1. stress: if a morpheme's stress depends on other morphemes it occurs with or if it falls within another morpheme's stress domain and cannot be stressed by itself, it is phonologically bound.

  2. boundary phenomena or (phonological) allomorphy: if a morpheme's segmental form depends on other morphemes it occurs with, it is phonologically bound.

  3. vowel harmony: if a morpheme is affected by or causes vowel harmony, it is phonologically bound.

Conversely, if a morpheme:

  1. has its own stress domain,
  2. is phonologically invariable, and
  3. does not show vowel harmony (in languages that have vowel harmony),

it should be treated as phonologically free.

In practice, there is rarely sufficient information in a grammar to judge the phonological boundness of a given morpheme according to these criteria. In those cases, we rely on the orthography an author uses. If a form is orthographically bound, it is assumed to be phonologically bound. If it stands on its own orthographically, it counts as a separate word. A small exploratory study of 134 morphemes across 23 random languages in Grambank showed that 90% of the orthographically bound morphemes were also phonological bound in the sense laid out in this wiki article (Lesage & Neshcheret 2017).

Wordhood is also relevant to the distinction between pronouns and indexes in Grambank: phonologically free person forms are considered as pronouns; phonologically bound person forms are considered as indexes.

References and further reading

Dixon, R. M. W. and Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. eds. 2002. Word: a cross-linguistic typology. Cambridge University Press.

Haspelmath, Martin. 2011. The indeterminacy of word segmentation and the nature of morphology and syntax. Folia Linguistica, 45(1), 31–80.

Lesage, Jakob & Neshcheret, Nataliia. 2017. Wordhood issues while compiling a large-scale typological database. Zürich. (Talk presented at the workshop "What is a word?", Zürich.)