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Subject: What Is a Word?
Question:
I've asked this question to a linguist friend, and it seems a rather difficult question. Is there a unique definition for what a word is? In written language, the answer could be apparently simple, but, is 'sewing machine' a word or two? In spoken language things seem to be more complicated. For example, I was surprised when I heard a French baby asking for milk, and she said 'du lait'. A Portuguese baby would say simply 'leite'. So, it seems that in French the 'du' is somewhat 'attached' to uncountable nouns like 'milk', and I wonder if the French translation for the Portuguese word 'leite' ('milk' in English) should be 'lait' or 'du lait'. In other words, would an illiterate French person identify the word 'lait' as a word, or would would he think of 'du lait' as a word?
Thank you.
Reply:
Actually, the question is not difficult at all. It's the answer that's difficult. But here's the nearest thing to a definition that most of us, well, many, can come to some sort of agreement on and that will universally apply:

A word is a string of sounds upon which clusters of phonological rules operate and at the end of which they stop operating, which string contains one or more morphemes but can be less than a full sentence.

That is, a word is a level of a language at which phonological rules in the language apply that is, in principle, greater in length than one morpheme but shorter in length than an entire sentence.

Corrollary: if there is no such identifiable level in a given language of application of phonological rules, that language does not have words.

I.e. all languages have sentences, exactly the same number of sentences; and all languages have morphemes. But it is not clear that all languages have ''words'', although most seem to.

In some languages, it is easily told where the word boundaries are. Consider these Turkish forms:
atlarymdan 'from my horses'
ineklerimden 'from my cattle (cows).

The both of these derive from at 'horse' and inek 'cow'. The y is a high back unround vowel [ɯ]. Now note that the string of suffixes lar/ler, ym/im, dan/den all have back vowels alternating with front vowels. The point at which the Vowel Harmony rules stop and then start over is a level that is greater in general than one morpheme but lesser than a whole sentence. Thus

Atlarymnehrindekoshtu. 'My horse ran in the river.'

Now we have back vowels a-a-y but then front vowels e-i-e and then back vowels again o-u. So there are between the individual morphemes and the entire sentence at least two places where the VH rules stop and then start over. I.e there are at least two word boundaries # internally to this sentence which means that this sentence contains at least three strings of a level intermediate between morpheme phonology and sentence. I.e. it contains at least three words.
Now ''written language'' as you call it is totally utterly irrelevant. In fact, the notion itself is rather a fuzzy one. Spaces are, like writing in general, merely a cultural convention and not all peoples who have had writing have used spaces. Japanese writing still doesnt, or does only sort
of. I.e. Japanese tend not to use spaces within a sentence, although Japanese does have an intermediate, or word, level phonology. But even there one has to distinguish folk linguistics from real linguistics. In real Japanese, the topic postposition 'wa' is in fact a true postposition. But the socalled postpositions like ni 'to/at' e 'up to', are really case suffixes and included in the stress and pitch patterns of the word they are suffixed onto. Likewise, Turks write the interrogative particle -mi/my/mu''/mu- as a separate word but it is clearly a harmonic suffix. Perhaps they ''think of it'' as a separate word because it can be suffixed to either nouns or verbs. But that doesnt make it a separate word.

With respect to your French toddler who wants 'du lait'', -- thats like an American toddler wanting ''some milk''. du has become a partitive article. A good case can be made for the claim that in English, the milk and a milk are each one word, not two. In Russian, prepositions are really prefixen and in fact semiliterate Russians know this and write them that way -- before the educational system corrupts them with the conventions of writing.

So the question of what's a word has to be answered for a given particular language. In the following English minimal pair, each is a word.

thistle ~ this'll.

But the word 'this'll' is not even a constituent syntactically -- or it is a pronoun with the modal auxiliary suffixed onto it.
But it is a word.

U of Cincinnati
Dept of Anthropology
Reply From: Joseph F Foster    click here to access email
Date: Dec-16-2004
Other Replies:
  1. Re: What Is a Word? David Fagan    (Dec-16-2004)
  2. Re: What Is a Word? Anthea Fraser Gupta    (Dec-16-2004)
  3. Re: What Is a Word? Geoffrey Sampson    (Dec-17-2004)
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