Electronic Resources:

25. Poetic Diction [Електронний ресурс]. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetic_diction#Poetic_diction_in_Englishю - 13 March 2009 at 23:58.

26. Kemmer S. Words in English. / Suzanne Kemmer. – [Електронний ресурс]. –http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~kemmer/Words04/meaning/index.html

1. THE WORD AS A UNIT OF LANGUAGE

   Definition of the word / Word boundaries / The word from the point of view of different language subsystems / Criteria of word classification / The problem of word-forms

The word is the central unit of language. At the same time it is the smallest linguistic unit which coincides with a separate fragment of reality. The main function of the word is to name objects or extralinguistic phenomena. The word is at the same time the basic unit of the lexical subsystem of language and the structural-semantic unit of language as a whole, as by its different aspects it belongs to all language subsystems (phonetics, morphology, lexis, syntax).

There exist numerous linguistic definitions of the word (from phonetic, morphological, syntactic perspective or a combination of these), among which the following can be mentioned:

• An association of a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment.

• The smallest unit of language, independent by meaning and form (by Acad. Zhirmounsky, 1976).

• The smallest unit of language, characterized by independence (autonomy) bigger than that of the morpheme (by Prof. Bloomfield, 1968).

• A part of a sentence, which we can use independently without changing its meaning (by Acad. Shcherba, 2008).

• The word is a unit of nomination that is characterized by complete form and idiomaticity (by Prof. Shmelev, 1964).

• The smallest independent, freely reproduced in speech, separately designed and meaningful unit of language which coincides with a known and separate element of reality (object, phenomenon, quality, process, relation, etc.) and whose basic function is marking, sign representation of this element – naming it, indicating it or expressing it (by Prof. Taranenko, 2006).

• A unit of language that native speakers can identify; "words are the blocks from which sentences are made" (Miller, 2006).

• A sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing or printing that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or of a combination of morphemes (Answers.com, 2006).

• A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses and sentences (en.wikipedia.org, 2009).

• A number of morphemes connected according to the grammar rules of a certain language and correlated to a certain object of extralinguistic reality (uk.wikipedia.org, 2006).

• A sequence of characters in a sentence, recognized as a lexical unit (jsoftware.com, 2006).

The abovegiven word definitions show, that the main features of the word are: independence, being separately shaped, possessing meaning (correlation with extralinguistic reality), morphemic structure (for analytical and inflected languages), and also the ability to build word-combinations and to function in a sentence.

When studying definitions of the word one should remember that “the notion of the word should be qualified with regard to a definite language or a group of related languages” (Вихованець, 1988, с. 14-19), while the borders of the word in different languages can vary.

According to Ferdinand de Saussure, “the word, notwithstanding all difficulty connected with its definition, is a unit that always comes before our mind as something central in language mechanism ” (Вихованець, 1988, с. 14-19).

The central position of the word in the language system is predefined by the fact that the other language units (phonemes, morphemes, sentences, word-combinations) are connected with the word by systemic relations. The status of the phoneme as a language unit is defined by its role in differentiation of meaning and formal differentiation of words (compare: cat – cut – cot; pet – pat – pot – put; live – love – leave, etc.). The status of the morpheme as the smallest meaningful unit of language is defined by its ability to build words (live – alive – lifeless; help – helpful – helpless – helping; husband – ex-husband, etc.). And the status of the sentence as the largest meaningful unit of language is defined by words as its components. Thus, the word is the central unit that runs through the whole language system.

The matter of word boundaries remains one of the discussion issues in defining the word. In most languages, a word is usually marked out in the text by interword separation such as spaces. In other words, the word is graphically separated in text. However, even in writing systems that use interword separation, word boundaries are not always clear. Thus, there are a number of compound words in the English language that, despite an interword separation between their elements, still make a single word.

For example, even though ice cream is written like two words, it is a single compound because it cannot be separated by another morpheme or rephrased like iced cream or cream of ice. Likewise, a proper noun is a word, however long it is. A space may not be even the main morpheme boundary in a word; the word New Yorker is a derivative of New York and the suffix -er, not of New and Yorker.

In English, many common words have historically progressed from being written as two separate words (e.g. to day) to hyphenated (to-day) to a single word (today), a process which is still ongoing, as in the common spelling of all right as alright.

There are five 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 phonetic pauses at the word boundaries. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic compound words (butterfly, pancake, mailbox, wildlife, sunburn, toolbox, teapot, etc.).

• Indivisibility. A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud, and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus, My family is important to me might become My family is the most important thing in the world to me. These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence.

• Minimal free forms. This concept was proposed by Prof. Leonard Bloomfield. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful units of speech that can stand by themselves. This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms, as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of).

• Phonetic boundaries. Some languages have particular rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example, in a language that regularly stresses the last syllable of a word (like French), a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony (like Turkish): the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. However, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.

• Semantic units. Much like the abovementioned minimal free forms, this method breaks down a sentence into its smallest semantic units. However, language often contains words that have little semantic value (and often play a more grammatical role), or semantic units that are compound words.

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 elusive.

Thanks to its central role in the language system, the word may be defined applying the criteria of the other language subsystems.

• Thus, from the point of view of phonetics, the word can be defined as a segment of a sentence (a sequence of sounds) separated by pauses, or as a sound complex united by a single stress.

• From the point of view of morphology the word is a number of morphemes united by a separate lexical meaning.

• According to the criteria of syntax, the word is a minimal syntactic unit, and the minimal unit able to function as a sentence.

• From the point of view of semantics the word is a minimal unit able to denote a separate phenomenon, to name a certain element of extralinguistic reality.

Words may also be classified according to the criteria of the language subsystems.

• According to the phonetic criteria words are classified into the stressed words: one-stress words (cat, muffin, simple) and two-stress words (underground, forget-me-not, alphabetic); and the unstressed words: grammatical words that are attached to the meaningful word constituting a “phonetic word” with it (enclitics, following the meaningful word: get by; and proclitics, preceding the meaningful word: an apple); one-syllable words (stand, lip, miss, last) and polysyllabic words (phenomenology, delete, happiness).

• According to the structural (morphemic) organization, words can be undivided (separately shaped: zero, evening, celebrate) and analytical: analytical morphological word forms (will have come, should have been going) and compound words (good bye, twenty five, Los Angeles).

• Morphologically, words can be classified as inflected (possessing an ending that indicates a certain grammatical form: rats, dated, out-coming, prefers) and uninflected (possessing no endings: automobile, year, swim); simple (consisting of a single stem without affixes: train, picture, green), derivative or affix-built (consisting of a stem and an affix (a prefix or a suffix) or several affixes: ventilat-or, interview-ee, pre-nuptial, over-estimate, re-generat-or, pre-consider-ation, hard-en-er, help-less-ness) and compound (consisting of two or more stems: doghouse, apple-tree, nightclub, mother-of-pearl, salt-and-pepper, mother-in-law).

• By motivation words can be classified as motivated (their meaning and form can be traced back to some root: friendly from friend, shameless from shame, forgetful from forget) and unmotivated (their meaning and form cannot be traced in synchrony: war, she, god, stick).

• By the combination of lexical and grammatical characteristics words are classified into the parts of speech or word-classes: nouns (man, fire, love), verbs (stay, like, build), adjectives (green, tiny, likeable), adverbs (quickly, very, really), pronouns (she, you, they), numerals (one, ten, thousand), prepositions (to, at, after, on, but), conjunctions (and, but, when), interjections (oh! Ouch, hi, well).

• By semantic features words are classified into different types: monosemantic words (possessing only one lexical meaning: loud-speaker, editorial) and polysemantic (possessing several lexical meanings: mouse, cover); into synonyms (run – sprint, labour – work, assassinate – murder – do in – kill), antonyms (dark – light, intelligent – stupid, dangerous - safe), etc.

• From the point of view of style and function, words can be described as colloquial (wanna, pop, jabber), dialect (skull-ache, head-wark for headache; extortion for blackmail), jargon (bird for rocket, garment for pressure space suit, smeller for geologist, swabber for pipeliner), literary (exercise, lawyer, tremendous), bookish (incipit, frontispiece, verso), belonging to various terminological systems (CD drive, processor, utility – from the IT terminology; anoxia, dialysis, iatrogenic – from medical terminology); stylistically neutral (computer, daughter, sky, help) and emotionally charged (sweetie, terrorism, atrocious, nasty, gorgeous); words that belong to active vocabulary (all the words used by a particular person, socioeconomic group, profession, etc.) and passive vocabulary (all the words recognized and understood, although not necessarily used, by a particular person), frequently used words (I, go, be) and rare words (galeanthropy, remedial, bookie).

• By origin, words can be either of native origin (love, help, mother, son, brother) or borrowed (enamoured, assistance, cousin, congener).

Lexis – the total stock of meaningful units of language – consists not only of words, but also of idioms and parts of words which express meaning, such as prefixes and suffixes.

The word stem with inflectional suffixes build the so-called word-forms, which are considered to be grammatical variations of one and the same word. For example, fibrillate, fibrillating, fibrillates and fibrillated are word-forms of the word fibrillate. There also exist units larger than a single word (ex. come in, rain cats and dogs) which still represent one indivisible meaning. That is why the term lexeme has been introduced.

A lexeme is a unit possessing lexical meaning, which exists regardless of the number of word-forms (the stem + inflections) it may have or the number of words it may contain. The headwords in a dictionary are all lexemes.

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