Defining what we use everyday: words

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WordsEveryone of us uses words every day, but yet we can hardly explain what a word is. Even linguists have given different explanations, which are not entirely incorrect but it seems they cannot be applied universally.

It is usually said that, on the one hand, a word is something that expresses different meanings. Yet, on the other hand, there are ‘multi-words’ which can express one meaning all together.

Moreover, a word is defined as an element characterized by phonological, graphical and morphological cohesion. Bear with me, let’s try and deepen that definition.

As far as phonology is concerned a word has one accent, but there are some words which have no accent (grammatical words), because they are always used together with other words (lexical words), for instance in the short sentence Elle est petit [ɛlɛpˈtit] we can find just one accent.

On the other hand, an orthographical word is a sequence of letters surrounded by blank spaces. As a matter of fact, there are some words which consist of more than one orthographical word (credit card, waiting room). Moreover, there are lots of languages which do not have a writing system, such as sign languages or other unwritten languages, which are about 696, according to what is reported by Ethnologue.

From the morphological point of view, it is said that a word cannot be interrupted. For example, on one hand we aren’t able to insert anything in the German word Wissenschaft, but, on the other hand, there are a lot of agglutinative languages all around the world in which this is possible. For instance, in Hungarian kertben means ‘in the garden’ (kert is ‘garden’ and ben is ‘inside’), but if we want to say ‘in the gardens’ we have to add an element between the two previous ones and say kertekben (ek means ‘plural’).

The truth is that words have a different structure according to the belonging language. Effectively, there are different types of languages classified by their syntactic or morphological structure. As far as morphology is concerned, we can distinguish the following language types:

In isolating languages words consist of one morpheme whose structure cannot be changed. For example, in Chinese wo kuai lai litterallymeans ‘I come soon’, that is ‘I’ll come’. Each word expresses just one meaning, which can be grammatical or lexical. To be sure if a word is a name or a verb, you have to look at the word position.

In polysynthetic languages words consist of lots of morphemes, which can also be all roots, because grammatical morphemes are often lexicalised. For instance, you can say Parent-woman-singular to designate the concept ‘mother’. Polysynthetic words can also correspond to sentences in other languages: e.g. in Paiute wii-to-kuchum-punku-rügani-yugwi-va-ntü-m(ü) means ‘they who are going to sit and cut up with a knife a black bull’.

The root is the primary lexical unit of a word, for example in the word fishes, fish- is the root and -es is the inflectional suffix. While the root has a lexical meaning, the suffix has a grammatical meaning. In these languages words can be made up of just roots cause grammatical meanings are lexicalized.

In agglutinative languages words consist of a root followed by lots of grammatical morphemes, as we saw as far as Hungarian is concerned.

In fusional languages words consist of a root and few grammatical morphemes, which can be derivative or flexive. Additionally, the grammatical meanings of a morpheme can be melted together: in the Italian word pizza, the grammatical morpheme -a means both singular and feminine.

We cannot unfortunately yet come to a conclusion, since words are not universally definable. But at this point a question can pop up in our minds: how is it possible we started creating dictionaries for other languages which work differently? The Eurocentric point of view got a leg up on it once again.

Here’s some food for thought:

“Words – so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”
– Nathaniel Hawthorne, writer (1804-1864)

“Words are the small change of thought.”
– Jules Renard, writer (1864-1910)

 

 

References:

Ethnologue

Sapir, Edward. Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921

 

 

By Maria Di Maro
Trainee at DAS Unit
Graduated in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”