A word' is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together, and has a phonetical value. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses, and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound.

Latin written without any word breaks in the Codex Claromontanus

Difficulty in defining the term

Depending on the language, words can sometimes be difficult to identify or delimit. While word separators, most often spaces, are commonplace in the written corpus of several languages, some languages such as Chinese and Japanese do not use these. Furthermore, synthetic languages often combine many different pieces of lexical data into single words, making it difficult to boil them down to the traditional sense of words found more easily in analytic languages; this is especially problematic for polysynthetic languages such as Inuktitut and Ubykh where entire sentences may consist of single such words. Especially confusing are languages such as Vietnamese, where spaces do not necessarily indicate breaks in words and boundaries must be determined by the context of the piece.

However, of all situations, the most confusing is those for oral languages, which potentially only offer phonolexical clues as to where word boundaries lie. Sign languages pose a similar problem as well, as does body language.

Official words, however, would be documented in a dictionary of whichever language you are categorizing it under.

Words in different classes of languages

In synthetic languages, 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 (such as love and -s).

Complexity of word boundaries in speech

In spoken language, the distinction of individual words is even more complex: short words are often run together, and long words are often broken up. Spoken French has some of the features of a polysynthetic language: je ne le sais pas ("I do not know it") tends towards /ʒənələsepa/. As the majority of the world's languages are not written, the scientific determination of word boundaries becomes important.

Determining word boundaries

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 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 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 I and my family 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, which are put inside a word. Similarly, some have separable affixes; in the German sentence "Ich komme gut zu Hause an," the verb ankommen is separated.

Minimal free forms

This concept was proposed by Leonard Bloomfield. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit 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, 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 very elusive.

External links

• What Is a Word? (PDF)