Morphology; The Definition of Word

The Definition of Word

it has been estimated that average speakers of language know from 45,000 to 60,000 words. this means that we as speakers must have stored these words somewhere in our heads, our so-called mental lexicon.

in non-technical everyday talk, we speak about 'words' without ever thinking that this could be a problematic notion. in this section we will see that, perhaps contra our first intuitive feeling, the 'word' as a linguistic unit deserve some attention, because it is not as straightforward as one might expect.

if you have define what a word is, you might first think of the word is a unit in the writing system, the so-called orthographic word.

you could say, for example, that a word is an uninterrupted string of letters which is preceded by a blank space and followed either by a blank space or a punctuation mark.

at first sight, this looks like a good definition that can be easily applied, as we can see in the sentence in example: linguistics is a fascinating subject

we count five orthographic words. there are five uninterrupted strings of letters, all of which are preceded by a blank space, for of which are also followed by a blank space, one of which is followed by a period. this count is also in accordance with our intuitive feeling of what is word is. even without this somewhat formal and technical definition, you might want to argue, you could have told that the sentence in example contain five words. however, things are not always that straightforward.

However, there are two basic problems with our orthographic analysis. The first one is that orthography is often variable. The second problem with the orthographically defined word is that it may not always coincide with our intuitions.

Thus, most of us would probably agree that girlfriend is a word (i.e. one word) which consists of two words (girl and  friend), a so-called compound. If compounds are one word, they should b e spelled without a blank space separating the elements that together make up the compound. Unfortunately, this is not the case. The compound apartment building, for example, has a blank space between apartment and building. It has been argued that the word could be defined in four other ways: in terms of sound structure (i.e. phonologically),  in terms of its internal integrity, in terms of meaning (i.e. semantically), or in terms of sentence structure (i.e. syntactically).

But there is another way of how the sound structure can tell us something about the nature of the word as a linguistic unit. Think of stress. In many languages (including English) the word is the unit that is crucial for the occurrence and distribution of stress. Spoken in isolation, every word can have only one main stress. the stress criterion is not readily applicable to function words and to words that hang on to other words, so-called clitics (e.g. ‘ve, ‘s, ‘ll).

Words are usually considered to be syntactic atoms, i.e. the smallest elements in a sentence. Words belong to certain syntactic classes (nouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions etc.), which are called  parts of speech, word classes  or syntactic categories. The position in which a given word may occur in a sentence is determined by the syntactic rules of a language. These rules make reference to words and the class they belong to. For example,  the  is said to belong to the class called articles, and there are rules which determine where in a sentence such words, i.e. articles, may occur (usually before nouns and their modifiers, as in  the big house). We can therefore test whether something is a word by checking whether it belongs to such a word class.

we think of words as the basic units of language. we may be tempted to think that this constitutes everything that needs to be said about words: they are units of language which are basic in two sense, both

1.      in that they have meanings that are unpredictable and so must be listed in dictionaries. And

2.      in that they are the building-blocks out of which phrases and sentences are formed.

We look at the intuitive notion of what a word is and see that there are several perspectives on word hood. A word has different properties depending on whether you’re looking at it phonologically, morphologically, syntactically or semantically.

Here’s one possible try: 1^st Definition word: a sequence of letters that we write consecutively, with no spaces. 2^nd Definition word: a sequence of sounds that we pronounce consecutively, with no pauses. 3^rd Definition word: a sequence of sounds which can be pronounced on its own, with pauses on either side. 4^th Definition word: A combination of vocal sounds, or one such sound, used in a language to express an idea (e.g. to denote a thing, attribute, orrelation), and constituting an ultimate minimal element of speech having a meaning as such; a vocable.

the possible definition of word we can say that, in spite of the intuitive appeal of the notion of ‘word’, it is sometimes not easy to decide whether a given string of sounds (or letters) should be regarded as a word or not. In the treatment above, we have  concentrated on the discussion of such problematic cases. In most cases, however, the stress criterion, the integrity criterion and the syntactic criteria lead to sufficiently clear results. The properties of words are

1.      words are entities having a part of speech specification

2.      words are syntactic atoms

3.      words (usually) have one main stress

4.      words (usually) are indivisible units (no intervening material possible)