General characteristics of functional words
Lecture 3
- THE DEFINITION OF A WORD.
Relationships between words and morphemes
Relationship between words and phrases
Status of clitics
Constituent Structure of Words
COMPOUNDS
CATEGORIES AND SUBCATEGORIES OF WORDS
Problem of classification
General characteristics of notional words
General characteristics of functional words
The word is a nominative unit of language; it is formed by morphemes; it enters the lexicon of language as its elementary component (i.e. a component indivisible into smaller segments as regards its nominative function); together with other nominative units the word is used for the formation of the sentence — a unit of information in the communication process.
Words are notoriously difficult entities to define in either universal or language-specific terms. Like most linguistic entities, they're Janus-like (джейнес, Янус (божество дверей, входа, выхода в римской мифологии, изображался с двумя лицами ). They look into two directions – upward toward phrases and sentences and downward toward morphemes. To identify them helps: Spelling: words are spelled with spaces on either end (minuses: cannot is one word but may not is two? compounds are irregularly divided: influx, in-laws, goose flesh.). Words in general resist interruption; we cannot freely insert pieces into words as we do into phrases or sentences. Thus in the phrase "she has arrived", we treat she and has as separate words, while the /-ed/ ending of arrived is treated as part of a larger word. In accordance with this, we can introduce other material into the white space between the words: "she apparently has already arrived." But there is no way to put anything at all in between /arrive/ and /-ed/. And there are other forms of the sentence in which the word order is different -- "has she arrived?"; "arrived, has she?" -- but no form in which the morphemes in arrived are re-ordered.
Tests of this kind don't entirely agree with the conventions of English writing. For example, we can't really stick other words in the middle of compound words like swim team and picture frame, at least not while maintaining the meanings and relationships of the words we started with. In this sense they are not very different from the morphemes in complex words like re+calibrate or consumer+ism, which we write "solid", i.e. without spaces. English speakers feel that many noun-noun compounds are words, even though they clearly contain other words, and may often be written with a space or a hyphen between them: "sparkplug", "shot glass". These are common combinations with a meaning that is not entirely predictable from the meanings of their parts, and therefore they can be found as entries in most English dictionaries. But where should we draw the line? are all noun compounds to be considered words, including those where compounds are compounded? What about (say) government tobacco price support program? In ordinary usage, we'd be more inclined to call this a phrase, though it is technically correct to call it a "compound noun" and thus in some sense a single -- though complex -- word.