Routledge Dictionary of Language and Linguistics
Term used intuitively in everyday language for a basic element of language; numerous linguistic attempts at defining the concept are not uniform and remain controversial. A word is characterized by different, often contradictory traits depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context. Compare the following suggestions for defining words, listed according to their level of description: (a) phonetic-phonological level: words are the smallest segments of sound that can be theoretically isolated by word accent and boundary markers like pauses, clicks, and the like, and which are further isolated on a (b) orthographic-graphemic level by blank spaces in writing or print; (c) on the morphological level, words are characterized as the basic elements of grammatical paradigms like inflection and are distinguished from the morphologically characterized word forms, cf. write vs writes, wrote, written; they are structurally stable and cannot be divided, and can be described as well by specific rules of word formation; (d) on the lexical-semantic level, words are the smallest, relatively independent carriers of meaning that are codified in the lexicon, and (e) can be described syntactically as the smallest permutable and substitutable units of a sentence. Although the essence of all these definitions can be boiled down to the three components of acoustic and semantic identity, morphological stability, and syntactic mobility as the main criteria, the term ‘word’ has been subject to multifaceted terminological differentiation or given up in favor of concepts like morpheme, lexeme, and formative. In X-bar theory, the lexical category (notation: X0) is equal to the concept of ‘word.’
References
Di Sciullo, A.M. and E.Williams. 1987. On the definition of word. Cambridge, MA.
Hyman, L.M. 1978. Word demarcation. In J.H. Greenberg et al. (eds), Universals of human language. Stanford, CA.
443–70.
Juilland, A. and A.Roceric. 1975. The decline of the word. Saratoga, CA.
Kramsky, J. 1969. The word as a linguistic unit. The Hague.
Lyons, J. 1968. Introduction to theoretical linguistics. Cambridge.
Zirmunsky, V.M. 1966. The word and its boundaries. Linguistics 27.65–91.
Bibliography
Juilland, A. and A.Roceric. 1972. The linguistic concept of word: analytic bibliography. The Hague.
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