Letters to Language

Language accepts letters from readers that briefly and succinctly respond to or comment upon either material published previously in the journal or issues deemed of importance to the field. The editor reserves the right to edit letters as needed. Brief replies from relevant parties are included as warranted.

Aronoff and sociological words

January 25, 2008

To the Editor:

In ‘In the beginning was the word’ (Language 83.4.803–30, 2007), Mark Aronoff argues that the lexeme is not the only idiosyncratic element in language, but that ‘it is the central such element’ (803). Aronoff and Fudeman (What is morphology?, Blackwell, 2005, p. 239) define a lexeme as a ‘word with a specific sound and a specific meaning. Its shape may vary depending on syntactic context’. Aronoff’s view that lexemes are the ‘basic meaningful atoms of language’ (803) runs counter to Yuen Ren Chao’s insight that the basic unit of language below the sentence level is socially defined and may not necessarily be the ‘word’ as it is commonly thought of in English. In his Grammar of spoken Chinese (University of California Press, 1968), Chao proposes the sociological word, which he defines as follows:

the type of unit, intermediate in size between a phoneme and a sentence, which the general nonlinguistic public is conscious of, talks about, has an everyday term for, and is practically concerned with in various ways. It is the kind of thing that every child learns to say, which a teacher teaches children to read and write in school, which a writer is paid for so much per thousand, … Thus it has all the social features of the common small change of every day speech which one would call a ‘word’ in English.

(136)

Chao points out that the sociological word in Chinese is not the ‘word’ in a strictly linguistic sense, but rather the zì, which in Chinese is either a spoken morpheme, usually monosyllabic, or a written Chinese character. Chao states further that whatever notion of syntactic word linguists posit for Chinese, it plays no part in the average Chinese speaker’s conception of subunits of the Chinese language. Chao gives the example of xiànzài ‘now’, composed of two zì: xiàn and zài. According to Chao (138), to ask what the syntactic word xiànzài means, a Mandarin speaker would say “Xiàn- zài” zhè liăngge zì shì shénme yìsi? ‘What is the meaning of these two zì “xiànzài”?’. In Chao’s view, only a Western-trained linguist would say “Xiànzài” zhège cí shì shénme yìsi? ‘What is the meaning of the syntactic word “xiànzài”?’, since the term cí with the meaning ‘syntactic word’ was introduced only a few decades before Chao wrote his book. Packard (The morphology of Chinese, Cambridge, 2000, p. 15) points out that ‘in the linguistic study of Chinese, the zì was considered to be the basic, primary unit of linguistic analysis as late as the 1920s’.

As further evidence of the prominence of zì as the basic linguistic unit in Chinese, I cite the fact that the Chinese government defines literacy on the basis of thousands of zì learned, that publications are counted in number of zì, and that, as noted by Packard (15), ‘In Chinese there are zì puzzles, Chinese speakers find themselves searching for the right zì, all writing is divided up into zì, and what are searched for in dictionaries and databases are usually zì’. Thus, Aronoff’s view that ‘the central basic meaningful constituents of language are not morphemes but lexemes’ (803) does not square with Chinese people’s understanding of the basic linguistic unit in their language, which is not a word but a monosyllabic morpheme written with one character.

This is not to say that words do not exist in Chinese. They do and they are an integral component of the grammar. Chao devotes several chapters to describing words and word formation in Chinese, and many other authors have written on Chinese words as well. (Packard 2000 provides a summary of the literature.) In Mandarin, the variety I...