2000 Word
- (Bauer, 2000) ⇒ Laurie Bauer. (2000). “Word.” In: "Morphology.", edited by Geert Booij, Christian Lehmann, and Joachim Mugdan. ISBN:9783110111286
Subject Headings: Word-Unit, Orthographic Word.
Notes
Cited By
Quotes
1. Introduction
The linguistic unit that is most easily used by non-linguists is the word. When Polonius asked Hamlet what he was reading, the answer was “Words, words, words”. We exchange a few words with an interlocutor, take people at their …
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2. Some Fundamental Distinctions
2.1 Lexeme and Word-Form
There are two answers to the question "How many different words are there in a sentence such as (1)?
(1) She sees truth where I see beauty.
In the first sense, see and sees are separate words because they have different shapes …
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In morphological works published since the 1970s, this distinction is usually drawn as a distinction between word-forms and lexemes: see and sees in (1) represent the same lexeme, but are distinct word-forms (see also Art. 62).
The lexeme can be variously thought as a minimal unit of syntactic analysis (Lyons 1963: 12), the fundamental unit of the lexicon (Matthews, 1974: 22) or perhaps more simply as a dictionary word or abstract unit of vocabulary (Bauer 1988:: 246). Some refinement of this notion will be made in 3.2 …
A word-form, on the other hand, is the orthographic or phonological form which represents a lexeme. The terms appear to have used first by Matthews (1972: 41), although the notion was current much earlier. The usual notation is to mark word-forms in italics, and this will be followed here. Although Lyons himself uses at least three different notations for lexemes, that most frequently adopted in other works is the notation introduced in 1968, by which lexemes are indicated by the use of small capitals …
One of the word-forms which represents the lexeme is traditionally used to name the lexeme. This form is called the citation form of the lexeme (see further Art. 62). This is the way in which these words are referred to in conventional dictionaries. What is important to realize is that this name is no more than a convenient label for the lexeme: the lexeme should not be equated with the word-form which happens to be used as its citation form …
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2.2 Grammatical or morphosyntactic word
In (2) and (3) there is a word-form changed which, in both cases, represents the lexeme CHANT. Yet chanted in (2) does not have the same function as changed in (3), as can be seen by comparing (2) with (4) and (3) with (5) where sang and sung are different word-forms.
- (2) She chanted the psalm.
- (3) She has chanted the psalm.
- (4) She sang the psalm.
- (5) She has sung the psalm.
To make this distinction, we need to be able to distinguish between chanted which is 'CHANT-PAST' and chanted which is 'CHANT-PART.PARTICIPLE'. That is, there is third notion of word, intermediate between the word-form and the lexeme and distinct from both. It is the word as a place in the morphological paradigm (see Art. 24). For some scholars whose particular interest is in inflection, this notion is term word out court (Matthews 1972: 163), but it seems preferable to retain the general term as a superordinate or less specific term. The terms grammatical word or (because of the ambiguity of "grammatical word", which can also be opposed to "lexical" or "content word", see 2.3 and Art. 27). morphosyntactic word are now widely used in this sense (Lyons 1968: 196; 1977: 73; Bauer 1988: 244).
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2.3 Function and content words
Another distinction between types of words is the distinction between grammatical or function words on the one hand, and lexical or content words on the other (or, equivalently, between closed-class words and open-class words or functors and contentives). According to this distinction because is a grammatical words in that its function is purely grammatical, while dog has lexical content (Hockell 1958:264; Hall 1964: 15). Some scholars use the term lexeme in the sense of content word (Martinet 1967: 16), though this is not longer usual terminology in English. For further discussion see Art. 27.
3. The word in semantics and lexicography
3.1 Words and ideas
The word has been defined by many scholars in a form with a particular meaning, and there has been a certain amount of dispute as to whether or not a word can be said to "have" meaning (Meillet 1921: 30; Gray 1939: 146; Rosett 1947:24; Bolinger 1963:134; Miller 1966; Kransky 1969:68). Many attempts at a definition of the word have made appeal to some notion of a meaning or an idea. …
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4. Defining the word-form
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An orthographic word is usually defined as a unit which, in writing, is bounded by spaces on both sides
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5. The psychological word (p.253)
Much is made in the literature of the fact that the word is a psychological unit, or a unit which has a certain psychological reality (Rosetti 1947:17;Meeussen 1949:295; Gudschinsky 1958; Kramsky 1969:71f.). …
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Children learning to write do not always put the word-breaks in the appropriate place (from the normative adult point of view), either. One five-year-old was heard to say that cartoon was a sense of two words, for instance. Sam Goldwyn's famous line: "In two words: im possible" comes inevitably to mind. But such cases are not the general rule.
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Similarly, it is relatively easy to show that the orthographic word does not always coincide with speakers intuitions about word-units. There are a number of cases even in highly codified languages like the European languages where native speakers are in doubt as to whether to write something as one or more words. Alright versus all right and insofaras versus insofar as versus in so far as provide simple examples from English …
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6. The word cross-linguistically
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7. Conclusion
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8. References
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