Word

This article is about the unit of speech and writing. Forthe Microsoft Office word processor, see MicrosoftWord. For other uses, see Word (disambiguation).

In linguistics a word is the smallest element that may beuttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content(with literal or practical meaning). This contrasts deeplywith a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaningbut will not necessarily stand on its own. A word mayconsist of a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock,red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks, redness, quickly,running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not beable to stand on its own as a word (in the words just men-tioned, these are -s, -ness, -ly, -ing, un-, -ed). A com-plex word will typically include a root and one or moreaffixes (rock-s, red-ness, quick-ly, run-ning, un-expect-ed), or more than one root in a compound (black-board,rat-race). Words can be put together to build larger ele-ments of language, such as phrases (a red rock), clauses(I threw a rock), and sentences (He threw a rock too buthe missed).The term word may refer to a spoken word or to a writ-ten word, or sometimes to the abstract concept behindeither. Spoken words are made up of units of soundcalled phonemes, and written words of symbols calledgraphemes, such as the letters of the English alphabet.

1 Definitions

Further information: Lexeme and Lemma (morphology)

The ease or difficulty of deciphering a word depends onthe language. Dictionaries categorize a language’s lexicon(i.e., its vocabulary) into lemmas. These can be taken asan indication of what constitutes a “word” in the opinionof the writers of that language.

1.1 Semantic definition

Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of “Mini-mal Free Forms” in 1926. Words are thought of asthe smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand bythemselves.[1] This correlates phonemes (units of sound)to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some writtenwords are not minimal free forms as they make no senseby themselves (for example, the and of).[2]

Some semanticists have put forward a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, indefin-able words representing fundamental concepts that areintuitively meaningful. According to this theory, seman-tic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning,without circularity, of other words and their associatedconceptual denotations.[3]

1.2 Features

In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words(also called lexical items in the literature) are construedas “bundles” of linguistic features that are united intoa structure with form and meaning.[4] For example, theword “bears” has semantic features (it denotes real-worldobjects, bears), category features (it is a noun), numberfeatures (it is plural and must agree with verbs, pronouns,and demonstratives in its domain), phonological features(it is pronounced a certain way), etc.

1.3 Word boundaries

The task of defining what constitutes a “word” involvesdetermining where one word ends and another wordbegins—in other words, identifying word boundaries.There are several ways to determine where the wordboundaries of spoken language should be placed:

• Potential pause: A speaker is told to repeat a givensentence slowly, allowing for pauses. The speakerwill tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries.However, this method is not foolproof: the speakercould easily break up polysyllabic words, or fail toseparate two or more closely related words.

• Indivisibility: A speaker is told to say a sentenceout loud, and then is told to say the sentence againwith extra words added to it. Thus, I have lived inthis village for ten years might become My familyand I have lived in this little village for about ten or soyears. These extra words will tend to be added in theword boundaries of the original sentence. However,some languages have infixes, which are put inside aword. Similarly, some have separable affixes; in theGerman sentence “Ich komme gut zu Hause an",the verb ankommen is separated.

• Phonetic boundaries: Some languages have par-ticular rules of pronunciation that make it easy to

1

2 3 PHILOSOPHY

spot where a word boundary should be. For exam-ple, in a language that regularly stresses the last syl-lable of a word, a word boundary is likely to fallafter each stressed syllable. Another example canbe seen in a language that has vowel harmony (likeTurkish):[5] the vowels within a given word share thesame quality, so a word boundary is likely to oc-cur whenever the vowel quality changes. Neverthe-less, not all languages have such convenient phoneticrules, and even those that do present the occasionalexceptions.

• Orthographic boundaries: See below.

1.3.1 Orthography

In languages with a literary tradition, there is interrelationbetween orthography and the question of what is consid-ered a single word. Word separators (typically spaces)are common in modern orthography of languages usingalphabetic scripts, but these are (excepting isolated prece-dents) a relatively modern development (see also historyof writing).In English orthography, compound expressions may con-tain spaces. For example, ice cream, air raid shelter andget up each are generally considered to consist of morethan one word (as each of the components are free forms,with the possible exception of get).Not all languages delimit words expressly. MandarinChinese is a very analytic language (with few inflec-tional affixes), making it unnecessary to delimit wordsorthographically. However, there are a great number ofmultiple-morpheme compounds in Mandarin, as well asa variety of bound morphemes that make it difficult toclearly determine what constitutes a word.Sometimes, languages which are extremely close gram-matically will consider the same order of words in dif-ferent ways. For example, reflexive verbs in the Frenchinfinitive are separate from their respective particle, e.g.se laver (“to wash oneself”), whereas in Portuguese theyare hyphenated, e.g. lavar-se, and in Spanish they arejoined, e.g. lavarse.[6]

Japanese uses orthographic cues to delimit words such asswitching between kanji (Chinese characters) and the twokana syllabaries. This is a fairly soft rule, because contentwords can also be written in hiragana for effect (thoughif done extensively spaces are typically added to maintainlegibility).Vietnamese orthography, although using the Latin alpha-bet, delimits monosyllabic morphemes rather than words.In character encoding, word segmentation depends onwhich characters are defined as word dividers.

2 Morphology

Main article: Morphology (linguistics)Further information: InflectionIn synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example,

Letters and words

love) may have a number of different forms (for example,loves, loving, and loved). However, for some purposesthese are not usually considered to be different words,but rather different forms of the same word. In these lan-guages, words may be considered to be constructed froma number of morphemes. In Indo-European languages inparticular, the morphemes distinguished are

• the root

• optional suffixes

• a desinence, or inflectional suffix.

Thus, the Proto-Indo-European *wrd̥hom would be ana-lyzed as consisting of

1. *wr-̥, the zero grade of the root *wer-

2. a root-extension *-dh- (diachronically a suffix), re-sulting in a complex root *wrd̥h-

3. The thematic suffix *-o-

4. the neuter gender nominative or accusative singulardesinence *-m.

3 Philosophy

Philosophers have found words objects of fascinationsince at least the 5th century BC, with the foundationof the philosophy of language. Plato analyzed wordsin terms of their origins and the sounds making them

3

up, concluding that there was some connection betweensound and meaning, though words change a great dealover time. John Locke wrote that the use of words “is tobe sensible marks of ideas”, though they are chosen “notby any natural connexion that there is between particulararticulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there wouldbe but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntaryimposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily themark of such an idea”.[7] Wittgenstein's thought transi-tioned from a word as representation of meaning to “themeaning of a word is its use in the language.”[8]

Archaeology shows that even for centuries prior to thisfascination by philosophers in the 5th century BC, manylanguages had various ways of expressing this verbal unit,which in turn diversified and evolved into a range of ex-pressions with wide philosophical significance. Ancientmanuscripts of theGospel of John reveal in its 5th chapterthe Rabonni Y’shua chastising the pharisees expecting tofind life in writings instead of himself. This perhaps couldhave led to John’s introduction in chapter of a descriptionin the Greek translation as “the logos”. A famous earlyscientist, scholar and priest, Thomas Aquinas, influencedCartesian philopsophy and mathematics by interpretingsuch passages consistently with his philosophy of logic.

4 Classes

Main article: Lexical category

Grammar classifies a language’s lexicon into severalgroups of words. The basic bipartite division possible forvirtually every natural language is that of nouns vs. verbs.The classification into such classes is in the traditionof Dionysius Thrax, who distinguished eight categories:noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, preposition, adverb,conjunction and interjection.In Indian grammatical tradition, Pāṇini introduced a sim-ilar fundamental classification into a nominal (nāma, suP)and a verbal (ākhyāta, tiN) class, based on the set ofdesinences taken by the word.

5 See also• Longest words

• Utterance

6 Notes[1] Katamba 11

[2] Fleming 77

[3] Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard 2002

[4] Adger (2003), pp. 36–7.

[5] Bauer 9

[6] Note that the convention also depends on the tense ormood—the examples given here are in the infinitive,whereas French imperatives, for example, are hyphenated,e.g. lavez-vous, whereas the Spanish present tense is com-pletely separate, e.g. me lavo.

[7] “Locke ECHU BOOK III Chapter II Of the Significationof Words”. Rbjones.com. Retrieved 13 March 2012.

[8] “Ludwig Wittgenstein (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philos-ophy)". Plato.stanford.edu. Retrieved 13 March 2012.

7 References• Adger, David (2003). Core Syntax: A MinimalistApproach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN0-19-924370-0.

• Barton, David (1994). Literacy: An Introduction tothe Ecology of Written Language. Blackwell Pub-lishing. p. 96.

• Bauer, Laurie (1983). English Word-formation.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-28492-9.

• Brown, Keith R. (Ed.) (2005) Encyclopedia of Lan-guage and Linguistics (2nd ed.). Elsevier. 14 vols.

• Crystal, David (1995). The Cambridge Encyclope-dia of the English Language (1 ed.). Cambridge:Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40179-8.

• Fleming, Michael et al. (2001). Meeting the Stan-dards in Secondary English: A Guide to the ITT NC.Routledge. p. 77. ISBN 0-415-23377-1.

• Goddard, Cliff (2002). “The search for the sharedsemantic core of all languages”. In Cliff God-dard and Anna Wierzbicka. Meaning and UniversalGrammar: Theory and Empirical Findings (PDF).Volume I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 5–40.

• Katamba, Francis (2005). English Words: Structure,History, Usage. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-29893-8.

• Plag, Ingo (2003). Word-formation in English.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-52563-2.

• Simpson, J.A. and E.S.C. Weiner, ed. (1989). Ox-ford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Clarendon Press.ISBN 0-19-861186-2.

• Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). Semantics: Primes andUniversals. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-870002-4.

8 External links

4 9 TEXT AND IMAGE SOURCES, CONTRIBUTORS, AND LICENSES

9 Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

9.1 Text• Word Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word?oldid=674630280 Contributors: William Avery, Stevertigo, D, Jahsonic, Ixfd64, Alfio,Ahoerstemeier, Mxn, Eszett, Vanished user 5zariu3jisj0j4irj, Dfeuer, Furrykef, Hyacinth, Joy, MD87, Cncs wikipedia, Fredrik, May-ooranathan, Pingveno, MSGJ, Dissident, Bfinn, Everyking, Justzisguy, Andycjp, Alexf, Quadell, Ran, Antandrus, Beland, OverlordQ,Mzajac, DanielDemaret, Karl-Henner, Cynical, Gscshoyru, Zondor, Trevor MacInnis, Mike Rosoft, Jiy, Discospinster, Rich Farmbrough,Dbachmann, ESkog, Ntennis, MBisanz, Kwamikagami, Shanes, Triona, Jpgordon, Bobo192, Smalljim, R. S. Shaw, AllyUnion, Chirag,LuoShengli, Jojit fb, Darwinek, Helix84, Nsaa, Ranveig, Alansohn, Mark Dingemanse, Jeltz, Riana, AzaToth, SlimVirgin, Lightdark-ness, Avenue, Snowolf, Wtmitchell, Velella, Fordan, Ish ishwar, Garzo, Docboat, Shafticus, BlastOButter42, Kusma, Versageek, Hen-ryLi, Bookandcoffee, Angr, Velho, Simetrical, Woohookitty, Mindmatrix, RHaworth, TigerShark, Logophile, Bellenion, Mazca, Qad-dosh, JeremyA, Umofomia, Wayward, Stefanomione, Gerbrant, Dysepsion, GSlicer, Mandarax, TAKASUGI Shinji, FreplySpang, Edison,Sjö, Sjakkalle, Koavf, Strait, Mo-Al, Matt Deres, Maurog, Sango123, Titoxd, RobertG, Latka, AJR, Andy85719, Gurch, KFP, JerseyDevil, DVdm, Cornellrockey, Roboto de Ajvol, YurikBot, Mnewmanqc, Lighterside, GLaDOS, Stephenb, Wimt, NawlinWiki, Grafen,Ptcamn, Twin Bird, RazorICE, Nutiketaiel, Cleared as filed, Nick, Brandon, AdiJapan, Zirland, Maunus, Tigershrike, 21655, Closed-mouth, Miguelmrm~enwiki, E Wing, Leeannedy, Crazyquesadilla, Katieh5584, Junglecat, DVD R W, ChemGardener, Sarah, SmackBot,Lavintzin, MattieTK, YellowMonkey, KnowledgeOfSelf, Hydrogen Iodide, Zerida, Bomac, SJD914, Canthusus, Wakuran, HalfShadow,The Rhymesmith, Gilliam, Ohnoitsjamie, Bluebot, LinguistAtLarge, Persian Poet Gal, Miquonranger03, MalafayaBot, SchfiftyThree,Neo-Jay, J. 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