A word is the smallest free form (an item that may be uttered in isolation with semantic Semantics is the study of meaning, usually in language. The word "semantics" itself denotes a range of ideas, from the popular to the highly technical. It is often used in ordinary language to denote a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation. This problem of understanding has been the subject of many or pragmatic content) in a language Language is a term most commonly used to refer to so called "natural languages" — the forms of communication considered peculiar to humankind. By extension the term also refers to the type of human thought process which creates and uses language. Essential to both meanings is the systematic creation, maintenance and use of systems of, in contrast to a morpheme In morpheme-based morphology, a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has semantic meaning. In spoken language, morphemes are composed of phonemes , and in written language morphemes are composed of graphemes (the smallest units of written language), which is the smallest unit of meaning. A word may consist of only one morpheme (e.g. wolf The grey wolf , often known simply as the wolf, is the largest wild member of the Canidae family. Though once abundant over much of Eurasia and North America, the grey wolf inhabits a reduced portion of its former range due to widespread destruction of its territory, human encroachment, and the resulting human-wolf encounters that sparked broad), but a single morpheme may not be able to exist as a free form (e.g. the English plural In linguistics, plurality or [a] plural is a concept of quantity representing a value of more-than-one. Typically applied to nouns, a plural word or marker (morpheme) is used distinguish a value other than the default quantity of a noun, which is typically one. Plurality is a linguistic universal, represented variously among the languages as a morpheme -s).

Typically, a word will consist of a root The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents. Content words in nearly all languages contain, and may consist only of, root morphemes. However,sometimes the term "root" is also used to describe the word minus its inflectional or stem In linguistics, a stem is a part of a word. The term is used with slightly different meanings, and zero or more affixes An affix is a morpheme that is attached to a word stem to form a new word. Affixes may be derivational, like English -ness and pre-, or inflectional, like English plural -s and past tense -ed. They are bound morphemes by definition; prefixes and suffixes may be separable affixes. Affixation is, thus, the linguistic process speakers use to form new. Words can be combined to create other units of language, such as phrases In grammar, a phrase is a group of words functioning as a single unit in the syntax of a sentence, clauses In grammar, a clause is a pair or group of words that consists of a subject and a predicate, although in some languages and some types of clauses the subject may not appear explicitly as a noun phrase. It may instead be marked on the verb . The most basic kind of sentence consists of a single clause. More complicated sentences may contain multiple, and/or sentences In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, often defined to indicate a grammatical and lexical unit consisting of one or more words that represent distinct concepts. A sentence can include words grouped meaningfully to express a statement, question, exclamation, request or command. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together form a compound In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word-formation that creates compound lexemes (the other word-formation process being derivation). Compounding or Word-compounding refers to the faculty and device of language to form new words by combining or putting together old words. In.

Word may refer to a spoken word or a written word, or sometimes, the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up of phonemes In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances, and written words of graphemes A grapheme is a fundamental unit in a written language. Examples of graphemes include alphabetic letters, Chinese characters, numerical digits, punctuation marks, and the individual symbols of any of the world's writing systems.

Definitions

Depending upon language in question, it can be either easy or difficult to identify or decipher a word. Dictionaries A dictionary, also referred to as a lexicon, wordbook, or vocabulary, is a collection of words in one or more specific languages, often listed alphabetically, with usage information, definitions, etymologies, phonetics, pronunciations, and other information; or a book of words in one language with their equivalents in another, also known as a take upon themselves the task of categorizing a language's lexicon In linguistics, the lexicon of a language is its vocabulary, including its words and expressions. More formally, it is a language's inventory of lexemes. Coined in English 1603, the word "lexicon" derives from the Greek "λεξικόν" , neut. of "λεξικός" (lexikos), "of or for words", from "λέ (i.e., its vocabulary) into lemmas A lemma in morphology is the canonical form of a lexeme. Lexeme, in this context, refers to the set of all the forms that have the same meaning, and lemma refers to the particular form that is chosen by convention to represent the lexeme. In lexicography, this unit is usually also the citation form or headword by which it is indexed. Lemmas have. These can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a "word" in the opinion of the writers.

Semantic definition

Leonard Bloomfield Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, introduced the concept of "Minimal Free Forms" in 1926. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves.^[1] This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes A lexeme ( pronunciation ) is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the English language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as RUN. A related concept is the lemma (or citation form), which is a (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms, as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of).^[2]

Some semanticists have proposed a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, indefinable words representing fundamental concepts that are intuitively meaningful. According to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations.^[3]

Features

In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words (also called lexical items in the literature) are construed as "bundles" of linguistic features that are united into a structure with form and meaning.^[4] For example, the word "bears" has semantic features (it denotes real-world objects, bears Bears are mammals of the family Ursidae. Bears are classified as caniforms, or doglike carnivorans, with the pinnipeds being their closest living relatives. Although there are only eight living species of bear, they are widespread, appearing in a wide variety of habitats throughout the Northern Hemisphere and partially in the Southern Hemisphere), category In grammar, a lexical category is a linguistic category of words (or more precisely lexical items), which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others. There are open word classes, which constantly acquire new members, and closed features (it is a noun), number In linguistics, grammatical number is a grammatical category of nouns, pronouns, and adjective and verb agreement that expresses count distinctions features (it is plural and must agree with verbs, pronouns, and demonstratives in its domain), phonological Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system. When describing the formal area of study, the term typically describes linguistic analysis either beneath the features (it is pronounced a certain way), etc.

Word boundaries

The task of defining what constitutes a "word" involves determining where one word ends and another word begins—in other words, identifying word boundaries. There are several ways to determine where the word boundaries of spoken language should be placed:

• Potential pause: A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly, allowing for pauses. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words.
• Indivisibility: A speaker is told to say a sentence In the field of linguistics, a sentence is an expression in natural language, often defined to indicate a grammatical and lexical unit consisting of one or more words that represent distinct concepts. A sentence can include words grouped meaningfully to express a statement, question, exclamation, request or command out loud, and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become My family and I have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have infixes An infix is an affix inserted inside a stem . It contrasts with adfix, a rare term for an affix attached to the outside of a stem, such as a prefix or suffix, which are put inside a word. Similarly, some have separable affixes; in the German German (Deutsch, [ˈdɔʏtʃ] ) is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Globally, German is spoken by approximately 120 million native speakers and also by about 80 million non-native speakers sentence "Ich komme gut zu Hause an", the verb ankommen is separated.
• Phonetic boundaries: Some languages have particular rules of pronunciation Pronunciation refers to the way a word or a language is spoken, or the manner in which someone utters a word. If one is said to have "correct pronunciation", then it refers to both within a particular dialect that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example, in a language that regularly stresses In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense the last syllable of a word, a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony Vowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on what vowels may be found near each other (like Turkish Turkish (Türkçe IPA [ˈt̪yɾktʃe] ) is spoken as a first language by over 77 million people worldwide, making it the most commonly spoken of the Turkic languages. Its speakers are located predominantly in Turkey and Cyprus, with smaller groups in Iraq, Greece, Bulgaria, the Republic of Macedonia, Kosovo, Albania and other parts of Eastern):^[5] the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. Nevertheless, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.

In practice, linguists apply a mixture of all these methods to determine the word boundaries of any given sentence. Even with the careful application of these methods, the exact definition of a word is often still very elusive.

• Orthographic boundaries: See below.

Orthography

In languages with a literary tradition Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio, there is interrelation between orthography The orthography of a language specifies the correct way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur or Serbian, there can be more than one orthography. Orthography is derived from Greek ὀρθός orthós ("correct") and γράφειν and the question of what is considered a single word. Word separators (typically spaces In writing, a space is a blank area devoid of content, serving to separate words, letters, numbers, and punctuation. Conventions for interword and intersentence spaces vary among languages, and in some cases the spacing rules are quite complex) are common in modern orthography of languages using alphabetic scripts, but these are (excepting isolated precedents) a modern development (see also history of writing The history of writing follows the art of expressing language by letters or other marks. In the history of how systems of representation of language through graphic means have evolved in different human civilizations, more complete writing systems were preceded by proto-writing, systems of ideographic and/or early mnemonic symbol. True writing, or).

In English orthography English orthography is the alphabetic spelling system used by the English language. English orthography, like other alphabetic orthographies, uses a set of rules that generally governs how speech sounds are represented in writing, words may contain spaces if they are compounds In linguistics, a compound is a lexeme that consists of more than one stem. Compounding or composition is the word-formation that creates compound lexemes (the other word-formation process being derivation). Compounding or Word-compounding refers to the faculty and device of language to form new words by combining or putting together old words. In or proper nouns A noun can co-occur with an article or an attributive adjective. Verbs and adjectives can't. In the following, an asterisk in front of an example means that this example is ungrammatical such as ice cream or air raid shelter.

Vietnamese Vietnamese , is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam. It is part of the Austroasiatic language family, of which it has the most speakers by a significant orthography, although using the Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world today. It evolved from the western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was borrowed and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome, whose alphabet was then adapted and further modified by the ancient, delimits monosyllabic morphemes, not words. East Asian orthography (languages using CJK characters CJK is a collective term for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, which constitute the main East Asian languages. The term is used in the field of software and communications internationalization) also tend to delimit syllables rather than full words. Conversely, synthetic languages A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an isolating language. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications , although there is a common tendency for agglutinative languages to often combine many lexical morphemes into single words, making it difficult to boil them down to the traditional sense of words found more easily in analytic languages In morphological typology , an isolating language (in fact the most extreme case of an analytic language) is any language in which words are composed of a single morpheme. This is in contrast to a synthetic language which can have words composed of multiple morphemes; this is especially difficult for polysynthetic languages Polysynthetic languages are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes. In contrast, isolating languages have a low morpheme-to-word ratio. Polysynthetic languages are languages with extremely high morpheme-to-word ratios, such as Inuktitut Inuktitut (Inuktitut syllabics: ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ , literally "like an Inuk") is the name of some of the Inuit languages spoken in Canada. It is spoken in all areas north of the tree line, including parts of the provinces of Newfoundland and Labrador, Québec, to some extent in northeastern Manitoba as well as the territories of Nunavut, and Ubykh Ubykh or Ubyx is a language of the Northwestern Caucasian group, spoken by the Ubykh people up until the early 1990s, where entire sentences may consist of a single word.

Morphology

In synthetic languages A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio, as opposed to a low morpheme-per-word ratio in what is described as an isolating language. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications , although there is a common tendency for agglutinative languages to, a single word stem (for example, love) may have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However, these are not usually considered to be different words, but different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes. In Indo-European languages in particular, the morphemes distinguished are

• the root
• optional suffixes
• a desinence.

Thus, the Proto-Indo-European *wr̥dhom would be analyzed as consisting of

1. *wr̥-, the zero grade of the root *wer-
2. a root-extension *-dh- (diachronically a suffix), resulting in a complex root *wr̥dh-
3. The thematic suffix *-o-
4. the neuter gender nominative or accusative singular desinence *-m.

Philosophy

Philosophers have found words objects of fascination since at least the 5^th century BC, with the foundation of the philosophy of language. Plato analyzed words in terms of their origins and the sounds making them up, concluding that there was some connection between sound and meaning though words change a great deal over time. John Locke wrote that the use of words "is to be sensible marks of ideas", though they are chosen "not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea".^[6] Wittgenstein's thought transitioned from a word as representation of meaning to "the meaning of a word is its use in the language."^[7]

Classes

Grammar classifies a language's lexicon into several groups of words. The basic bipartite division possible for virtually every natural language is that of nouns vs. verbs.

The classification into such classes is in the tradition of Dionysius Thrax, who distinguished eight categories: noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, preposition, adverb, conjunction and interjection.

In Indian grammatical tradition, Pāṇini introduced a similar fundamental classification into a nominal (nāma, suP) and a verbal (ākhyāta, tiN) class, based on the set of desinences taken by the word.

See also

• Grammar
• Lexeme
• Lexical item
• Lexicon
• Lexis (linguistics)
• Meaning (linguistics)
• Morphology (linguistics)
• Speech
• Utterance

Footnotes

1. ^ Katamba 11
2. ^ Fleming 77
3. ^ Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard 2002
4. ^ Adger (2003), pp. 36–7.
5. ^ Bauer 9
6. ^ www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/classics/locke/ctb3c02.htm
7. ^ plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein

References

• Adger, David (2003). Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Barton, David (1994). Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Blackwell Publishing. p. 96.
• Bauer, Laurie (1983). English Word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-28492-9.
• Brown, Keith R. (Ed.) (2005) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.). Elsevier. 14 vols.
• Crystal, David (1995). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1 ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40179-8.
• Fleming, Michael et al. (2001). Meeting the Standards in Secondary English: A Guide to the ITT NC. Routledge. p. 77.
• Goddard, Cliff (2002). "The search for the shared semantic core of all languages". in Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka. Meaning and Universal Grammar: Theory and Empirical Findings. Volume I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 5–40. http://www.une.edu.au/lcl/nsm/pdf/Goddard_Ch1_2002.pdf
• Katamba, Francis (2005). English Words: Structure, History, Usage. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-29892-X.
• Plag, Ingo (2003). Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-52563-2.
• Simpson, J.A. and E.S.C. Weiner, ed (1989). Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-198-61186-2.
• Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198700024.

External links

• What Is a Word? - a working paper by Larry Trask (see [1] for attribution), Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Sussex.

Categories: Concepts | Lexical units | Syntactic entities | Units of linguistic morphology | Words

Personal tools

• New features
• Log in / create account

Namespaces

• Article
• Discussion

Variants

Views

• Read
• Edit
• View history

Actions

Search

Navigation

• Main page
• Contents
• Featured content
• Current events
• Random article

Interaction

• About Wikipedia
• Community portal
• Recent changes
• Contact Wikipedia
• Donate to Wikipedia
• Help

Toolbox

• What links here
• Related changes
• Upload file
• Special pages
• Permanent link
• Cite this page

Print/export

• Create a book
• Download as PDF
• Printable version

Languages

• Aragonés
• Asturianu
• Беларуская (тарашкевіца)
• Bosanski
• Brezhoneg
• Български
• Català
• Чӑвашла
• Česky
• Cymraeg
• Dansk
• Deutsch
• Eesti
• Español
• Esperanto
• Euskara
• فارسی
• Føroyskt
• Français
• Galego
• 贛語
• 한국어
• Hrvatski
• Ido
• Bahasa Indonesia
• Interlingua
• Иронау
• Íslenska
• Italiano
• עברית
• Къарачай-Малкъар
• ქართული
• Kiswahili
• Kreyòl ayisyen
• Kurdî
• Latina
• Latviešu
• Lietuvių
• Magyar
• Македонски
• Malagasy
• മലയാളം
• Bahasa Melayu
• Nederlands
• 日本語
• ‪Norsk (bokmål)‬
• ‪Norsk (nynorsk)‬
• Occitan
• پنجابی
• Papiamentu
• Polski
• Português
• Ripoarisch
• Română
• Runa Simi
• Русский
• Саха тыла
• Shqip
• Sicilianu
• Simple English
• Slovenčina
• Slovenščina
• Српски / Srpski
• Srpskohrvatski / Српскохрватски
• Suomi
• Svenska
• Tagalog
• தமிழ்
• తెలుగు
• ไทย
• Türkçe
• Українська
• Tiếng Việt
• Walon
• Winaray
• ייִדיש
• Žemaitėška
• 中文

• This page was last modified on 27 July 2010 at 16:17.
• Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License ; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.
  Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.
• Contact us

• Privacy policy
• About Wikipedia
• Disclaimers

See Also:

• Words Coined In the 1990s
• Category:Words Coined In the 1990s: Encyclopedia
• Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Hosts: WordPress: Directory
• Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Templates: WordPress: Directory
• Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Hosts: WordPress: Free: Directory

What Links Here:

Recently Viewed Pages:

• Home
• Tailrank.com
• Search Terms
• Asynchronous Conferencing: Blogs
• Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Chats and Forums: Directory
• Chats and Forums: Shopping
• Web Page: Encyclopedia
• Blogs: Dictionary
• Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Networks: Directory
• Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Directories: Web Rings and Cliques: Directory

Most Popular Pages:

• BlogTV: Answers
• Computers: Internet: On the Web: Weblogs: Chats and Forums: Directory
• Chats and Forums: Shopping
• BlogScope: Blogs
• WebEx: Images
• Download
• Chats and Forums: Toc
• Content
• Tailrank.com
• Generators: Images

Related 'Word' Searches: