2.

The Word
Ambiguity of the term “Word”
•Since the beginning of the grammatical
study in Europe, the concept of a word has
been considered to be of central
importance. But there are several ways of
defining words, and these are not
equivalent. We therefore need to examine
several definitions, and to understand the
differences among them.
• Orthographic Words. An orthographic word is a
written sequence which has a white space at
each end but no white space in the middle. If
you look at the paragraph above, you will find it
easy to pick out the orthographic words: Since,
the, beginning, of, and so on. Very obviously,
orthographic words exist only in written texts,
and they have no existence in speech. The
sequence “ice cream” consists of two
orthographic words although according to its
meaning in some respects it is one English word.
• Phonological Words. A phonological word is a piece
of speech which behaves as a unit of pronunciation
according to criteria which vary from language to
language. In English a phonological word contains
only one main stress. The following sentence: He is
fond of birds and animals” has three main stresses
falling on the words “fond”,, “birds” and “animals”.
This sentence therefore contains three phonological
words. One obvious way of breaking up the
utterance into phonological words is as follows: [ he
is fond of ] [birds and] [animals].
• Lexical Items. A lexical item (or lexeme) is
an abstract unit of the vocabulary of a
language, and it must be represented in
speech or writing by one of the possibly
several forms it can assume for
grammatical purposes. The lexical item
“sing” can be represented by any of the
five grammatical forms: sing, sings, sang,
sung, singing.
• Grammatical Word-Forms. A grammatical
word-form is one of the several forms that
may be assumed by the lexical item for
grammatical purposes. So, for example take,
takes, took, taken and taking are all
grammatical forms of the lexical item “take”.
Sometimes a lexical item exhibits only one
grammatical form, for example, the lexical
items “music”, “scissors”, and “with” have only
one grammatical form apiece: music, scissors
and with.
• We have already seen that an English lexical
item usually has one grammatical form which
carries no grammatical marking at all, its base
form. All the other grammatical forms of a
lexical item, the ones that carry grammatical
markings, are the inflected forms of that
lexical item. The lexemes “music” and “with”
have no inflected forms at all, while “scissors”
has only the inflected form scissors.
• Content Words and Function Words. Lexical items are
commonly divided into content words and function
words. A content word (or lexical word) is a lexical item
which has semantic content – that is, which has a
readily identifiable meaning. English content words
include nouns, verbs, adjectives and most adverbs.
Function words may be prepositions, pronouns,
auxiliary verbs, conjunctions, grammatical articles and
particles. Dictionaries define the specific meanings of
content words, but can only describe the general usage
of function words. By contrast, grammars describe the
use of function words in detail, but have little interest
in lexical words.
 2.1. The Definition of the Word

• The definition of the word is one of the most

difficult in linguistics because the simplest word
has many different aspects. It has a sound form
because it is a certain arrangement of phonemes;
it has its morphological structure, being also a
certain arrangement of morphemes; when used
in actual speech, it may occur in different word
forms, different syntactic functions and signal
various meanings.
• Being the central element of any language system,
the word is a focus for the problems of phonology,
lexicology, syntax, morphology and also for some
other sciences that have to deal with language and
speech, such as philosophy and psychology. In
linguistics the word has been defined syntactically,
semantically, phonologically and by combining
various approaches.
• It has been syntactically defined for instance as “the
minimum sentence” by H. Sweet and much later by
L.Bloomfield as a “minimum free form”.
• E.Sapir takes into consideration the syntactic and
semantic aspects when he calls the word “one of the
smallest completely satisfying bits of isolated
meaning, into which the sentence resolves itself”.
Another very important characteristic of the word is
its indivisibility. The essence of indivisibility will be
clear from a comparison of the article “a” and the
prefix “a-“ in a life and alive. A life is a word-group
because we can separate its elements and insert
other words between them (e.g. a long life), while
alive is a word: it is indivisible, i.e. nothing can be
inserted between its elements.
• John Lyons points out that word
should be discussed in terms of two
criteria: positional mobility and
uninterruptability. To illustrate the
first he segments into morphemes
the following sentence:
The – boy- s- walk- ed- slow-ly – up –the – hill
• The sentence may be regarded as a
sequence of ten morphemes, which
occur in a particular order relative to
one another. There are several
possible changes in this order which
yield an acceptable English sentence:
Slow-ly-the-boy-s-walk-ed-up-the-hill
Up-the-hill-slow-ly-walk-ed-the-boy-s
• There is no possibility of the sequence s-the-
boy, ly-slow, ed – walk. “One of the
characteristics of the word is that it tends to
be internally stable but positionally mobile-
writes John Lyons in his book “Introduction to
Theoretical Linguistics”.
• Stephen Ullmann analyzed the word from the
semantic point of view,” it will fall into a
certain number of meaningful segments which
are ultimately composed of meaningful units.
These meaningful units are called words.”
• The semantic-phonological approach may be illustrated by
A.H. Gardiner’s definition:’ A word is an articulate sound –
symbol in its aspect of denoting something which is spoken
about.”
• A. Meillet combines the semantic, phonological and
grammatical criteria and defines the word as “the
association of a particular meaning with a particular group
of sounds capable of a particular grammatical
employment.”
• Summing up, we can say that a word is the smallest
significant unit of a given language capable of functioning
alone and characterized by positional mobility within a
sentence, morphological uninterruptability and semantic
integrity.
 2.2 The Word as the Basic Unit of Language
• Words are the central elements of
language system, they face both ways: they
are the biggest units of morphology and
the smallest of syntax, and what is more,
they embody the main structural
properties and functions of the language.
Words can be separated in an utterance by
other such units and can be used in
isolation.
• The modern approach to word studies is based on
distinguishing between the external and the internal
structures of the word. By external structure of the word
we mean its morphological structure. For example, in the
word post-impressionists the following morphemes can be
distinguished: the prefixes post-, im-, the root press, the
noun, the noun forming suffixes -ion, -ist, and the
grammatical suffix of plurality –s. All these morphemes
constitute the external structure of the word
postimpressionists. The internal structure of the word, or
its meaning, is nowadays commonly referred to as the
words semantic structure. The area of lexicology
specializing in the semantic studies of the word is called
semantics.
• The word possesses both external or formal unity and
semantic unity. The formal unity of the word can best
be illustrated by comparing a word and a word-group
comprising identical constituents. The difference
between a ”blackbird” and “a black bird” is best
explained by their relationship with the grammatical
system of the language. The word “blackbird”, which is
characterized by unity, possesses a single grammatical
framing: “blackbird/s”. The first constituent “black” is
not subject to any grammatical changes. In the word-
group “a black bird” each constituent can acquire
grammatical forms of its own: “the blackest birds I’ve
ever seen”.
• Other words can be inserted between the
components which is impossible so far as the word is
concerned as it would violate its unity: “a black night
bird”.
• In the word-group “a black bird” each of the
meaningful words conveys a separate concept:
“bird” – “a kind of living creature”, “black” –
“acolour”. The word “blackbird” conveys only one
concept –“the type of the bird”. This iis one of the
main features of any word: it always conveys one
concept, no matter how many component
morphemes it may have in its external structure.
• A further structural feature of the word is its
susceptibility to grammatical employment. In
speech most words can be used in different
grammatical forms in which their
interrelations are realized. The system
showing a word in all its word-forms is called
its paradigm. Nouns are declined, verbs –
conjugated, qualitative adjectives have
degrees of comparison. Some adverbs also
have degrees of comparison (e.g. well, badly),
others are immutable (e.g. here, there, never).
• The lexical meaning of a word is the same
throughout the paradigm, i.e. all the word-forms of
one and the same word are lexically identical. The
grammatical meaning varies from one form to
another (cf. to take, takes, took, taking or singer,
singer’s, singers, singers’). Therefore, when we speak
of the word “singer” or the word “take” as used in
actual utterances we use the term word
conventionally, because what is manifested in the
speech event is not the word as a whole but one of
its forms which is identified as belonging to one
definite paradigm.
 2.3. Types of Words
• Words can be classified according to their
morphological structure, semantic type,
syntactic function, stylistic differentiation or
according to their origin.
• Morphologically, we distinguish monomorphic,
i.e. root-words, and polymorphic words, i.e.
derivatives, compounds, compound-
derivatives (derivational compounds).
• Semantically, we distinguish monosemantic words,
i.e. words having only one lexical meaning, and
polysemantic words, i.e. words having several
meanings.
• Syntactically, we distinguish categorematic, i.e.
notional words, and syncategorematic, i.e. form-
words.
• Stylistically, we distinguish neutral, elevated
(bookish), colloquial, slang words, etc.
• Etymologically, we distinguish native, borrowed,
hybrid and international words.