Word as the basic unit of the language

Lecture 2

Word as an object of study

Outline

Word as the basic unit of the language

Criteria of defining a word

Review of different definitions of the word

Word as the basic unit of the language

Everybody seems to know what a word is. But when this notion is to be scientifically defined, or even made more exact in practical life (as when paying " per word"), we run into problems. For example, don’t started as two words – but is it one word now? Is each other and one another one or two words? Is man in the street a word or a phrase? To make the matter even more complicated, not only various branches of linguistics like phonology, morphology and syntax, but also logic, philosophy, psychology, semiotics (=the science studying signs and symbols in general) and even computer science have to do with words, each in a different aspect

Each scientist trying to define " the word" fits his definition to the needs of his own research – and so comes up with a definition unlike all the previous ones. For example, a materialistic philosopher would stress that words are " names of matter", while for an idealist they " express ideas"; for a physiologist, a word is " a kind of signal that a human organism reacts upon" (just like Pavlov's dogs reacted to bells and whistles), while for a computer programmer or operator, a " word" may be any sequence of printed symbols, so long as it opens and ends with a space symbol. Any definition of " word" short enough to be useful in one field of study would be criticized for incompleteness by those working in all the other fields.

Lexicology studies various lexical units: morphemes, words, variable word-groups and phraseological units. The units of the vocabulary or lexical units are two-faced elements possessing form and meaning.

Uniting meaning and form, word is composed of one or more morphemes, each consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation. Morphemes are also meaningful units but they cannot be used independently, they are always parts of words whereas words can be used as a complete utterance (e.g. Listen!). The combinations of morphemes within words are subjected to certain linking conditions. When a derivational affix is added a new word is formed, thus, listen and listener are different words. In fulfilling different grammatical functions words may take functional affixes: listen and listened are different forms of the same word. Different forms of the same word can be also built analytically with the help of auxiliaries. E.g.: The world should listen then as I am listening now.

So, the word is the basic unit of language system, the largest on the morphologic and the smallest on the syntactic plane of linguistic analysis. The word is a structural and semantic entity within the language system.

It should be pointed out that there is another approach to the concept of the basic language unit. Both words and phraseological units are names for things, namely the names of actions, objects, qualities, etc. Unlike words proper phraseological units are word-groups consisting of two or more words whose combination is integrated as a unit with a specialised meaning of the whole. To illustrate, the lexical or to be more exact the vocabulary units tattle, wall, taxi are words denoting various objects of the outer world; the vocabulary units black frost, red tape, a skeleton in the cupboard are phraseological units: each is a word-group with a specialised meaning of the whole, namely black frost is ‘frost without snow or rime’, red tape denotes bureaucratic methods, a skeleton in the cupboard refers to a fact of which a family is ashamed and which it tries to hide.