Criteria of defining a word

Since the word is such a fundamental unit in both language and thought, let us not try an exhaustive definition and concentrate instead on those properties of words which are of greatest importance for linguistics:

1. A word is a unity of meaning and form.

2. A word is composed of one or more morphemes which are the smallest meaningful units.

3. The meaning of a word is a whole and not a sum of meanings of its component morphemes.

4. The morphemes, and therefore the word, are made up of one or more spoken sounds (or their graphic representations).

5. A word is made graphically and phonetically separate from other words by spacing, intonation, and stress. Thus, a number of formal criteria can be suggested. In writing, for instance, a word is something which has a space on either side. But in speech, there is no exact equivalent of this; we do not pause after every word when we speak. Then one such criterion in writing is leaving a space and in oral speech it is a potential pause which often coincides with the spaces in writing.

6. A word, unlike a morpheme, is a minimum syntactically complete structure (= a minimum complete utterance). Another criterion is that words are the smallest units in a language that can be used alone as a sentence. We can say Go. Here. Men. We cannot use the bits of words as sentences, as with un -, -ize, in-.

7. There are two classes of morphemes – those used to produce new words and those used for linking words together in a syntactic unity.

8. The freedom of linking words together is limited by syntactic rules which form a separate field of study. Yet another criterion for word identification is in terms of minimal unit of positional mobility – which is simply a precise way of saying that the word is the smallest unit which can be moved from one position to another in a sentence – bits of words cannot be so moved.

9. Words are relatively stable in use, and therefore can be isolated and fixed in dictionaries. Words are the units which have fixed internal structure. Technically this characteristic is often referred to as internal stability. If we want to insert fresh information into a sentence, then it is between the words that this information goes and not within them. Words are not interruptable.

Another technique may be helpful in identifying separate words in a language, namely the use of formulas of speech. One may say This is a... followed by various free forms such as pen, book, house, etc.

So the word differs from the morpheme, on the one hand, and the word-combination, on the other, and can be singled out in the flow of speech as an independent unit.

We can distinguish the following criteria of the word:

– the phonetic criterion (pause, accent, intonation),

– the acoustic identity of the word,

– the criteria of separability, replaceability and displaceability,

– the semantic criterion,

– the criterion of isolatedness and reproducibility.

One more problem that is connected with the problem of the definition of the word is the existence of homonymous forms. In this case it is difficult to say whether it is one word or different words. As an example let’s take a sentence " Of all the saws I ever saw I never saw a saw as that saw saws". Here we deal with two different words: the noun saw and the verb saw, because they have two different paradigms. Paradigm is the system of the grammatical forms of a word. It means that though they are identical in sound and spelling, they are different in meaning, distribution (usage) and origin.