Concept of word in Chinese

[anonymoose]

You keep claiming things about what's relevant to speakers without providing sufficient evidence (your 蝴蝶 example doesn't count).

Well, I'm not sure what kind of evidence you want. But how about the fact that the length of manuscripts (books, and so on) are measured by the number of 字 and not 词, and the fact that pay for commercial manuscripts is per 字 and not 词 would suggest 字 is a more relevant concept to Chinese than is 词.

Well, there's one area where 词 are important for Chinese speakers: dictionaries. The dictionary will not have random combinations of 字 (better: 词素), only those combinations of 字 which make up 词, so a dictionary user must have at least some idea about of a 词 is.

This is of course true, but 词 are just a natural result of a combination of 字. Dictionaries are still based fundamentally on 字, and contain head entries even for 字 which never appear at the beginning of a 词.

(Oh, also one more thing about "broken down into 字": for many native speakers 蝴蝶 would be a be a 字 that can be broken down into two 字.)

I suspect that for the majority of native speakers, 蝴蝶 would be considered to be two 字, not one. Maybe someone should start a pole and see.

many native speakers are used to a confused concept of 字

The concept only becomes confused when linguist come along and confuse it. For average speakers, one 字 is one character, plain and simple.

[rob07]

Is a 成语 a 词?

[renzhe]

John DeFrancis: Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

It's a very good book, and I recommend it to everyone learning Chinese.

One interesting statistic that he cites is that around 30% of Chinese characters can NOT be used alone.

They have to be combined with other characters to form words. Like prefixes and suffixes in European languages.

The academic discussion about the meaning of words is interesting, but it is also clear to me that people tend to segment a sentence into meaningful concepts, not meaningful grammatical or orthographical pieces.

[jiangping]

In a way it's not that surprising that unless a Chinese person takes a particular interest in words or language, he's unlikely to be scrupulous about terminology. Like Chrix has mentioned, the concept of a word is often very fuzzy among native speakers of English too, with definitions like "the things in between the spaces on a page". This sort of conflation between what is basically a spoken phenomenon and how we choose to represent it on paper (or silk or bamboo!) is exactly what has happened in China as well.

This may have happened because those who first tackled issues of language in China were exegetes analysing traditional texts. Seeing as they were analysing them in textual rather than spoken form, it makes perfect sense for them to refer to words generally as 字. It's possible that this usage has then trickled down to the general population, who never really thought about it.

Today, modern Chinese is still written with 字, which in most cases represent a monosyllabic morpheme, and as such present a simple and convenient way to understand new words, such as the example given by Ramsey quoted in OneEye's original post: "Jīguāng, zhèi liǎngge zì shì shénma yìsǐ?". But does that really mean that the average Chinese person doesn't know the difference between a character and a word? Surely not.

As mentioned by Daan earlier, some Chinese people will differentiate between 字 characters, and 詞兒 words. Others use 詞兒 and 字 somewhat interchangeably when referring to words. In OneEye's original post, Ramsey is quoted as saying that the term 詞 was introduced only quite recently as the term for "word". Therefore, the current overlap in meaning between 字 and 詞 might simply represent 詞s struggle to enter the average Chinese person's vocabulary. If this is true, we might predict that 詞 will gradually monopolise the meaning of "word", and 字 will recede to referring only to characters.

[zhwj]

But how about the fact that the length of manuscripts (books, and so on) are measured by the number of 字 and not 词, and the fact that pay for commercial manuscripts is per 字 and not 词 would suggest 字 is a more relevant concept to Chinese than is 词.

In the same way that word counts in the English-language publishing world use averages and rules-of-thumb over precise counts, the 字数 relates to typesetting and hence is often only loosely related to the actual number of Hanzi -- it also includes punctuation, leading and trailing white space, and other factors that affect the length of a typeset piece (illustrations will pump up the word count displayed on the copyright page, for example). But few people are going to argue that "；" is either a 字 or a 词.

[Don_Horhe]

The word is a notoriously difficult entity to define/delimit, regardless of the language, since it is more of a psychological unit rather than a purely linguistic one. Yet native speakers have no trouble doing just that. E. Sapir writes in Language:

In truth it is impossible to define the word from a functional standpoint at all, for the word may be anything from the expression of a single concept... to the expression of a complete thought... . In the latter case the word becomes identical with the sentence. The word is merely a form, a definitely molded entity that takes in as much or as little of the conceptual material of the whole thought as the genius of the language cares to allow

and later on says:

No more convincing test could be desired than this, that the naive Indian, quite unaccustomed to the concept of the written word, has nevertheless no difficulty in dictating a text to a linguistic student word by word; he tends, of course, to run his words together as in actual speech, but if he is called to a halt and is made to understand what is desired, he can readily isolate the words as such, repeating them as units. He regularly refuses, on the other hand, to isolate the radical or grammatical element, on the ground that it "makes no sense."... The best that we can do is to say that the word is one of the smallest, completely satisfying bits of isolated "meaning" into which the sentence resolves itself.

There is no universal and yet exhaustive definition for "word" - it differs from language to language. We can generalize by saying that the word is the smallest syntactic unit which can be used by independently. 'Smallest' means that it cannot be divided into constituent parts. Should it be divided, then the constituent parts would not be able to function independently or if they could, they wouldn't have the same function/meaning as the word itself. Monosyllabic words (有，看，人) naturally cannot be broken down into meaningful, functional parts. In polysyllabic words such as 建设, 改造, the two morphemes comprise a single word. Even though they can be divided into two morphemes and/or syllables, they cannot function as independent words which have the same meaning as the polysyllabic ones. 'Syntactic unit which can be used independently' is to say that the word can connect with other words to create a phrase or a sentence.

As for the difference between 字 and 词, an oversimplified explanation would be that 字 more or less corresponds to the concept of morpheme, be it radical or bound, able to form a word by itself or not, or merely a single syllable. In other words, a 字 can be a 词, a 语素, a 词素 (there is a difference) or simply an 音节.

[atitarev]

In my experience on this, teachers would teachers both 字 and 词. 词 is more in combination - 生词, 词典, etc. The phrase 我不知道 is naturally described as 4 字, not 3 词, even if Chinese people know exactly what 词 is. It makes sense to me and I actually like this, it means people know exactly how many characters are used to write it but not necessarily know how to break them up into words or when romanising, the standard way would be "wǒ bù zhīdào" but "wǒ bùzhīdào" and "wǒ bù zhī dào" also occur. In 看着 - are these two words? You may get these type of questions because there is no clear word boundary in writing.

The concept of word is somewhat blurred or different in Japanese as well (some scholars even treat whole clauses as one word in Japanese) and I suspect it could be hard to define in some other language, which don't use spaces or are monosyllabic (or used to be monosyllabic) .

Edited February 23, 2010 at 12:05 AM by atitarev

[OneEye]

Well, there's one area where 词 are important for Chinese speakers: dictionaries. The dictionary will not have random combinations of 字 (better: 词素), only those combinations of 字 which make up 词, so a dictionary user must have at least some idea about of a 词 is.

That was my original confusion. 辭源 was first published in 1915, and 辭海 in 1936, so the concept was certainly around 70 years before Ramsey's book. Were these considered scholarly dictionaries, something the average person isn't familiar with? I was under the impression that they, especially 辭海, were pretty popular.

Lots of good stuff to think about in this thread so far. Lots more reading for me to do, too. This might make a good paper topic sometime. Thanks for all the help so far.

Edited February 23, 2010 at 03:11 PM by OneEye

[chrix]

Moved the discussion on Japanese and other languages here.

[trien27]

Is a 成语 a 词?

Otherwise, we won't say 一句成语. Since we never said "一词成语", I don't think so.

I suspect that for the majority of native speakers, 蝴蝶 would be considered to be two 字

Well it's one 词 composed of two 字. In other words, it's a "2-morpheme" word. If you learned them one by one, then each would be a "grapheme", each composed of radical + phonetic or semantic + phonetic, etc...?

That was my original confusion. 辭源 was first published in 1915, and 辭海 in 1936, so the concept was certainly around 70 years before Ramsey's book. Were these considered scholarly dictionaries, something the average person isn't familiar with? I was under the impression that they, especially 辭海, were pretty popular.

Have you read books by San Duanmu?

王蝶/蝴蝶

What you suggested is wrong. In 王蝶, 蝶 is just the abbreviated form of 蝴蝶.

A lot of words like apple, grape, etc... in Chinese were originally loaned from other languages and so the two characters which they represent can't have a different meaning when separated.

Edited March 3, 2010 at 03:14 AM by trien27

[Daan]

Is a 成语 a 词?

I don't think so, but I heard one described as a 詞彙 today.

[chrix]

you can't really take the classifier as an argument, as you can also use 則 and 條.

But more importantly, chengyu form a linguistic unit and should be best regarded as a word, not a phrase, as usually their form are rigidly fixed. Many of them can be used like a predicate and take objects (with 對 usually though, a point made by 馮勝利).

EDIT: there's also one guy who wrote his dissertation on wordhood in Mandarin (the name escapes me at the moment) and who makes (in my eyes rather convincingly) a case to treat chengyu as words and not as phrases or clauses. As they say, "today's syntax is tomorrow's morphology"...

[rob07]

Thanks for sharing your expertise, Chrix, that chengyu question has been on my mind for a while. For the reasons you give, it seemed to me that chengyus should be words (also note that dictionaries don't usually seem to distinguish between chengyu and other words in any meaningful way), but I can certainly understand why others wouldn't agree with that. I guess it just goes to show how tricky these issues can get.

[OneEye]

Have you read books by San Duanmu?

No. I've only recently become interested in Chinese linguistics, so I've read very little. I'm definitely open to suggestions, though.

I also started a thread a while back asking for some ideas on what to read.

[zhxlier]

I don't understand the entire thread. The quotation op brought up is certainly wrong.

[Daan]

It would be helpful if you could explain why you think it is wrong, rather than just saying so