WORD
The first difficulty in defining what the term “word” is that it has more than one definition. In fact, traditionally, there are three completely different and exclusive definitions for the term “word”. To understand the difficulties in defining and differentiating the meanings of the term “word” we must first discuss each of the senses of the term. The first sense of the term “word” is known as word form. In word form, a word is a unit that can be physically defined, be it orthographically or phonetically, as a word. It is easier to see the boundaries between words in the orthographic word, the written word, than in the phonological, or spoken word. This is because of the visual spaces between words. However, even that is open to debate, as will be discussed later. In both forms, boundaries are identified by pauses and junctures between words. The second sense of the term “word” is known as the lexeme. “A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics” defines lexemes as being “the units of vocabulary”. In addition, along with “Morphology”, by Matthews, it states that lexemes are found in dictionaries as entries. The common factor among lexemes is the underlying set of forms. The lexeme is more abstract than the word form and pertains to the variants of the original form. For example, the lexeme work has the variants works, worked, working etc. The third and final sense of the term “word” is known as word. This sense refers to the grammatical unit. As such it is used in conjunction with the sentence and the morpheme. The sentence is considered the largest grammatical unit in which an idea can be put forward, while the morpheme is the smallest. In other words, a sentence is made up words, which are in turn made up of at least one free-form morpheme. Words themselves have very different grammatical characteristics from one language to another. For instance, in Chinese, a sentence is mostly made up of a series of monosyllables. Some sentence can be made up of only one word, but not all words are capable of this. The words that qualify to do this are known as free forms. This indicates that “not all words are equal”. It can be difficult to decide whether two seemingly separate words, i.e., by a space, are in fact grammatically separate. An example used by Matthews is the French “des enfants”. Phonologically, they are not separate, but on paper they clearly are. In this case “des enfants” is a phonological word, if not a written one. Another example is “washing machine”. The term is a relatively new invention derived from two words that describe this appliance. Should the constituents be combined, into washingmachine? We can now see that not only does the term “word” offer difficulties for us in relation to the different “categories of linguistic description”, but there are problems within the individual senses of the term.
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