Word boundaries in english

In writing, word boundaries are conventionally represented by spaces between words. In speech, word boundaries are determined in various ways, as discussed below.

Related Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

• Assimilation and Dissimilation
• Conceptual Meaning
• Connected Speech
• Intonation
• Metanalysis
• Mondegreen
• Morpheme and Phoneme
• Oronyms
• Pause
• Phonetics and Phonology
• Phonological Word
• Prosody
• Segment and Suprasegmental
• Slip of the Ear
• Sound Change

Examples of Word Boundaries

• «When I was very young, my mother scolded me for flatulating by saying, ‘Johnny, who made an odor?’ I misheard her euphemism as ‘who made a motor?’ For days I ran around the house amusing myself with those delicious words.» (John B. Lee, Building Bicycles in the Dark: A Practical Guide on How to Write. Black Moss Press, 2001
• «I could have sworn I heard on the news that the Chinese were producing new trombones. No, it was neutron bombs.» (Doug Stone, quoted by Rosemarie Jarski in Dim Wit: The Funniest, Stupidest Things Ever Said. Ebury, 2008
• «As far as input processing is concerned, we may also recognize slips of the ear, as when we start to hear a particular sequence and then realize that we have misperceived it in some way; e.g. perceiving the ambulance at the start of the yam balanced delicately on the top . . ..» (Michael Garman, Psycholinguistics. Cambridge University Press, 2000

Word Recognition

• «The usual criterion for word recognition is that suggested by the linguist Leonard Bloomfield, who defined a word as ‘a minimal free form.’ . . .
• «The concept of a word as ‘a minimal free form’ suggests two important things about words. First, their ability to stand on their own as isolates. This is reflected in the space which surrounds a word in its orthographical form. And secondly, their internal integrity, or cohesion, as units. If we move a word around in a sentence, whether spoken or written, we have to move the whole word or none of it—we cannot move part of a word.»
  (Geoffrey Finch, Linguistic Terms, and Concepts. Palgrave Macmillan, 2000)
• «[T]he great majority of English nouns begins with a stressed syllable. Listeners use this expectation about the structure of English and partition the continuous speech stream employing stressed syllables.»
  (Z.S. Bond, «Slips of the Ear.» The Handbook of Speech Perception, ed. by David Pisoni and Robert Remez. Wiley-Blackwell, 2005)

Tests of Word Identification

• Potential pause: Say a sentence out loud, and ask someone to ‘repeat it very slowly, with pauses.’ The pauses will tend to fall between words, and not within words. For example, the / three / little / pigs / went / to / market. . . .
• Indivisibility: Say a sentence out loud, and ask someone to ‘add extra words’ to it. The extra item will be added between the words and not within them. For example, the pig went to market might become the big pig once went straight to the market. . . .
• Phonetic boundaries: It is sometimes possible to tell from the sound of a word where it begins or ends. In Welsh, for example, long words generally have their stress on the penultimate syllable . . .. But there are many exceptions to such rules.
• Semantic units: In the sentence Dog bites vicar, there are plainly three units of meaning, and each unit corresponds to a word. But language is often not as neat as this. In I switched on the light, the has little clear ‘meaning,’ and the single action of ‘switching on’ involves two words.​
  (Adapted from The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, 3rd ed., by David Crystal. Cambridge University Press, 2010)

Explicit Segmentation

• «»[E]xperiments in English have suggested that listeners segment speech at strong syllable onsets. For example, finding a real word in a spoken nonsense sequence is hard if the word is spread over two strong syllables (e.g., mint in [mǀntef]) but easier if the word is spread over a strong and a following weak syllable (e.g., mint in [mǀntəf]; Cutler & Norris, 1988).
  The proposed explanation for this is that listeners divide the former sequence at the onset of the second strong syllable, so that detecting the embedded word requires recombination of speech material across a segmentation point, while the latter sequence offers no such obstacles to embedded word detection as the non-initial syllable is weak and so the sequence is simply not divided.
  Similarly, when English speakers make slips of the ear that involve mistakes in word boundary placement, they tend most often to insert boundaries before strong syllables (e.g., hearing by loose analogy as by Luce and Allergy) or delete boundaries before weak syllables (e.g., hearing how big is it? as how bigoted?; Cutler & Butterfield, 1992).
  These findings prompted the proposal of the Metrical Segmentation Strategy for English (Cutler & Norris, 1988; Cutler, 1990), whereby listeners are assumed to segment speech at strong syllable onsets because they operate on the assumption, justified by distributional patterns in the input, that strong syllables are highly likely to signal the onset of lexical words. . . .
  Explicit segmentation has the strong theoretical advantage that it offers a solution to the word boundary problem both for the adult and for the infant listener. . . .
  «Together these strands of evidence motivate the claim that the explicit segmentation procedures used by adult listeners may in fact have their origin in the infant’s exploitation of
  rhythmic structure to solve the initial word boundary problem.»​
  (Anne Cutler, «Prosody and the Word Boundary Problem.» Signal to Syntax: Bootstrapping from Speech to Grammar in Early Acquisition, ed. by James L. Morgan and Katherine Demuth. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996)

The question relies on a number of unidentified assumptions about word boundaries, which are not totally alien but also are not obvious or obviously right. The main problem I see is the premise that there is this one thing, word boundary, that solves myriad problems.

The notion of there being a single «phonological tree» seems to be historically based on importing notions of structure from syntax (we wanted phonology to be more like syntax), but the properties of tree-like representations as used in syllable and foot structure are not the same as those employed in syntactic representations (prosodic structure is not seriously recursive in the way that syntactic trees are; phonological «trees» flout the single-mother convention). Attempting to align phonological grouping with morphosyntactic grouping just leads to tears, though that is not obvious if you consider just English. The problem is that combining a VC root with a VC prefix and a VC suffix typically leads to phonological V.C+V.C+VC, i.e. syllable boundaries seriously misaligned with morpheme boundaries.

In English and in contrast to other languages such as Arabic, there is not much evidence for resyllabification between words, so prosodic and syntactic constituency are not generally at odds. At the level of affixation, we do have mismatches involving V-initial suffixes (invite [ɪn.ˈvajʔ], invitee [ɪn.vaj.ˈtʰi]), but not at the phrasal level in e.g. «invite Igor». In asking about word boundaries in «the big house», «motorcycle» or «What are you going to do?», you have to have a theory of entities (are there both word and syllable boundaries? Are there also morpheme boundaries?), and what those entities do for you. Are there necessary or sufficient criteria for diagnosing «.», «+» or «#»?

The reason for positing word boundaries is usually syntactic: «the» is a word, it occupies a certain syntactic position, same with «big». We might claim that «motorcycle» has an internal word boundary because «motor» and «cycle» are words, and neither can reasonably be called a prefix or suffix. Phonologically speaking, there is nothing about «motorcycle» that demands a word boundary.

Certain concatenations that can be lumped together under the rubric «contraction», for example «going to» → «gonna», «will not» → «won’t», «got you» → «gotcha», also «Harry’s», behave phonologically more like affixational structures, even though they are syntactically more like word combinations. Just positing a readjustment of boundaries (removing the «#») does not solve all of the problems, especially in negative inflections (my analytic prejudice is now revealed).

The final complication in analyzing the aforementioned concatenations is that boundaries are also invoked to account for some facts of speech speech rhythm. The two syllables of «lighthouse» have a fixed rhythmic organization (prominence on the first syllable), but the phrase «light house» has variable rhythm (depends on whether you’re shopping for a light house vs a heavy house; or is the discussion about a house that is light vs. a hose that is light). Again, attempting to reduce these speech rhythm properties to nothing more than differences in word boundaries has proven to be futile. Once you introduce some other mechanism for encoding rhythmic distinctions, manipulations of word boundaries becomes unnecessary – we can just posit that word boundaries are there if and only if we syntactically concatenate two words. You still have to have an account of whether «won’t» is two syntactic words (as opposed to two syntactically-mandated functions manifested within a single word).

In other words, manipulating word boundaries has not proven to be a useful method of analysis.

Tests of Word Identification

What is syllabic boundary?

All word boundaries are syllable boundaries. By convention, but the syllable boundary is placed inside the word boundary: # pat # –> #$ pat $#. V(C)DlV –> V(C)D $ lT. ‘D’ = an alveolar stop, (C) = any immediately preceding consonant, ‘l’ = /l/.

What is word boundary?

The word “boundary” means “a line which marks the limits of an area; a dividing line:” This means literally “地域边界线” a line on the border of a piece of land. Word boundaries are the beginning and the ending of a word. In writing, word boundaries are conventionally represented by spaces between words.

1. Potential pause: Say a sentence out loud, and ask someone to ‘repeat it very slowly, with pauses.
2. Indivisibility: Say a sentence out loud, and ask someone to ‘add extra words’ to it.
3. Phonetic boundaries: It is sometimes possible to tell from the sound of a word where it begins or ends.

What are the examples of word boundaries?

Some examples of phrases and sentences of how word boundaries are determined. As a /matter of fact/, I will /go away/ as soon as I finish my food. It is just because I have the /fear of God/ that I will allow them to travel in their order of merit.

What’s another word for boundaries?

What is another word for boundary?

border	borderline
bounding line	dividing line
limit	bound
edge	termination
threshold	fringe

What part of speech is the word boundary?

inflections

How do you describe a boundary?

: something (such as a river, a fence, or an imaginary line) that shows where an area ends and another area begins. : a point or limit that indicates where two things become different. : unofficial rules about what should not be done : limits that define acceptable behavior.

What is the verb form of boundary?

verbsmark/form a boundaryThe river Jordan marks the boundary between Israel and Jordan. cross/transcend a boundaryThese are practical problems that cross political boundaries. boundary + NOUNa boundary wall/fenceThe boundary wall was about twenty foot high.

Is Boundarylessness a word?

The word was “Boundarylessness”. The word means what it says: eliminate boundaries within an organization or a team to create universal ownership of the organization’s overall mission. The concept is to create an open, sharing climate that seeks to harness the combined strength of the business.

What does boundaryless mean?

Filters. Without an obvious boundary or boundaries. adjective.

How do you spell boundaryless?

Correct spelling for the English word “boundaryless” is [bˈa͡ʊndəɹiləs], [bˈa‍ʊndəɹiləs], [b_ˈaʊ_n_d_ə_ɹ_i_l_ə_s] (IPA phonetic alphabet).

What is boundaryless career theory?

Boundaryless career theory is based on the notion that society progresses from a structured state to a relatively flexible state in which boundaries have become more permeable.

What is a boundary less career?

Boundaryless careers are those in which individual workers can move across boundaries between employers and/or work units within employers, develop their careers via extraorganisational networks or information, and reject existing (conventional) career opportunities for work-related or nonwork-related reasons (Arthur.

Who coined the term boundaryless career?

Arthur and Rousseau

What jobs offer flexibility?

The 20 Best Jobs for Flexibility

• Account executive. This position is available in a variety of industries.
• Account manager.
• Business development.
• Business process analyst.
• Client services coordinator.
• Data scientist.
• Financial analyst.
• Front-end developer.

What jobs are flexible and pay well?

21 High-Paying Side Jobs That Offer Flexibility

• Bookkeeper. Pay: $30/hour.
• Career Coach. Pay: $20/hour.
• Consultant. Pay: $100/hour.
• Copy Editor. Pay: $25/hour.
• Curriculum Writer. Pay: $50/hour.
• Education Training Specialist. Pay: $34/hour.
• Executive Assistant. Pay: $38/hour.
• Graphic Designer. Pay: $25/hour.

What jobs have flexible hours?

Also known as flextime or a flexible work schedule, flexible hours means you have different start and end times for your workday than the standard 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Essentially, having flexible work hours means employees can begin their work earlier in the day or later than the originally set time.

What job has the best schedule?

The 20 Best Jobs with Flexible Hours

• Web Developer.
• Mental Health Counsellor.
• Nurse.
• Physical Therapist.
• Meet and Greeter.
• Customer Service Representative.
• PR Specialist.
• Uber Driver.

What are typical 9 to 5 jobs?

The definition of a nine to five is a normal and routine job. The term is often used to describe boring or unfulfilling jobs. An example of a nine to five might be working at a fast food restaurant just to make a paycheck if you have no interest in food.

What are the best 9 5 jobs?

17 JOBS THAT OFFER YOU A STRESS-FREE ENVIRONMENT AND PAY HANDSOMELY WELL

• Computer Hardware Engineer. Job Overview:
• Curator. Job Overview:
• Freelance Photographer. Job Overview:
• Food Technologist. Job Overview:
• Robotics Engineer. Job Overview:
• Massage Therapist. Job Overview:
• Economist. Job Overview:
• Technical Writer.

What jobs are flexible for moms?

Top jobs for moms returning to work

1. Server. National average salary: $12.09 per hour.
2. Teacher’s aide. National average salary: $12.06 per hour.
3. Child care provider. National average salary: $11.56 per hour.
4. Retail sales associate.
5. Hairstylist.
6. Library assistant.
7. Office assistant.
8. Medical records clerk.

Which job is best for housewife?

List of Jobs for Housewives

• Build and sell handmade products. The beauty of handmade products is understood well by every Indian.
• Start a YouTube channel.
• Digital Marketing.
• Sell home-cooked food.
• Take tuitions.
• Become a travel agent.
• Start a blog.
• Start a home-based parlor.

What are the highest paying stay at home jobs?

Career Fields with High-Paying Work-from-Home Jobs and $100K Salaries

• Product Manager. PayScale salary range: $54K–$121K.
• Project Manager, Operations.
• Senior Project Manager, IT.
• Business Development Manager.
• Channel Sales Manager.
• Senior Account Manager.
• Senior Sales Executive.
• Front-End Developer.

What stay at home jobs are real?

25 Best Jobs for Stay At Home Moms (or Dads)

• Bookkeeping.
• Virtual Assistant.
• Data Entry.
• Transcription.
• Customer Service Representative.
• Chat Agent.
• Virtual Receptionist.
• Virtual Travel Agent.

What are the top 10 stay at home jobs?

These jobs are some of the best because they offer a flexible schedule while you work from home with children.

• Online Teacher.
• Online Tutor.
• Education Test Scorer.
• Blogging.
• Chat Agent.
• Customer Service Representative.
• Data Entry Clerk.
• Bookkeeper.

What are the easiest stay at home jobs?

Freelance Work

• Work for Yourself. One of the easiest ways is to ensure you get paid weekly is to be self-employed and working directly with freelance clients.
• Work for a National Company.
• Upwork.
• Fiverr.
• Design T-shirts at CafePress.
• Become a Virtual Assistant.
• Amazon MTurk.
• Clickworker.

How much does Amazon pay to work from home?

How much does a Work From Home Customer Service Representative at Amazon make? The typical Amazon Work From Home Customer Service Representative salary is $11. Work From Home Customer Service Representative salaries at Amazon can range from $11 – $17.

Can I work with Amazon from home?

The office that comes to you. Sometimes, Amazon has virtual (or “work-from-home”) positions available to qualified individuals who live in some areas. So if you aren’t near a physical Amazon location, or just want to see if there are virtual opportunities in your area, you’re in the right place.

How do I work for Amazon from home?

You can access the job site by going to www.amazon.jobs and clicking on “Remote Career Opportunities” — or just go straight here. From there, you can search for the role you want (like “customer service”) or you can apply some filters using the checkboxes on the left, and take a look at what’s available.

Does Amazon allow work from home?

Of course, the bulk of Amazon’s 1.3 million global workforce are employed in fulfillment centers — and there’s no work from home or hybrid approach for them.

This article is about the unit of speech and writing. For the computer software, see Microsoft Word. For other uses, see Word (disambiguation).

A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguists on its definition and numerous attempts to find specific criteria of the concept remain controversial. Different standards have been proposed, depending on the theoretical background and descriptive context; these do not converge on a single definition.^: 13:618 Some specific definitions of the term «word» are employed to convey its different meanings at different levels of description, for example based on phonological, grammatical or orthographic basis. Others suggest that the concept is simply a convention used in everyday situations.^: 6

The concept of «word» is distinguished from that of a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of language that has a meaning, even if it cannot stand on its own. Words are made out of at least one morpheme. Morphemes can also be joined to create other words in a process of morphological derivation.^: 768 In English and many other languages, the morphemes that make up a word generally include at least one root (such as «rock», «god», «type», «writ», «can», «not») and possibly some affixes («-s», «un-«, «-ly», «-ness»). Words with more than one root («[type][writ]er», «[cow][boy]s», «[tele][graph]ically») are called compound words. In turn, words are combined to form other elements of language, such as phrases («a red rock», «put up with»), clauses («I threw a rock»), and sentences («I threw a rock, but missed»).

In many languages, the notion of what constitutes a «word» may be learned as part of learning the writing system. This is the case for the English language, and for most languages that are written with alphabets derived from the ancient Latin or Greek alphabets. In English orthography, the letter sequences «rock», «god», «write», «with», «the», and «not» are considered to be single-morpheme words, whereas «rocks», «ungodliness», «typewriter», and «cannot» are words composed of two or more morphemes («rock»+»s», «un»+»god»+»li»+»ness», «type»+»writ»+»er», and «can»+»not»).

Definitions and meanings

Since the beginning of the study of linguistics, numerous attempts at defining what a word is have been made, with many different criteria. However, no satisfying definition has yet been found to apply to all languages and at all levels of linguistic analysis. It is, however, possible to find consistent definitions of «word» at different levels of description.^: 6 These include definitions on the phonetic and phonological level, that it is the smallest segment of sound that can be theoretically isolated by word accent and boundary markers; on the orthographic level as a segment indicated by blank spaces in writing or print; on the basis of morphology as the basic element of grammatical paradigms like inflection, different from word-forms; within semantics as the smallest and relatively independent carrier of meaning in a lexicon; and syntactically, as the smallest permutable and substitutable unit of a sentence.^: 1285

In some languages, these different types of words coincide and one can analyze, for example, a «phonological word» as essentially the same as «grammatical word». However, in other languages they may correspond to elements of different size.^: 1 Much of the difficulty stems from the eurocentric bias, as languages from outside of Europe may not follow the intuitions of European scholars. Some of the criteria for «word» developed can only be applicable to languages of broadly European synthetic structure.^: 1-3 Because of this unclear status, some linguists propose avoiding the term «word» altogether, instead focusing on better defined terms such as morphemes.

Dictionaries categorize a language’s lexicon into individually listed forms called lemmas. These can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a «word» in the opinion of the writers of that language. This written form of a word constitutes a lexeme.^: 670-671 The most appropriate means of measuring the length of a word is by counting its syllables or morphemes. When a word has multiple definitions or multiple senses, it may result in confusion in a debate or discussion.

Phonology

One distinguishable meaning of the term «word» can be defined on phonological grounds. It is a unit larger or equal to a syllable, which can be distinguished based on segmental or prosodic features, or through its interactions with phonological rules. In Walmatjari, an Australian language, roots or suffixes may have only one syllable but a phonologic word must have at least two syllables. A disyllabic verb root may take a zero suffix, e.g. luwa-ø ‘hit!’, but a monosyllabic root must take a suffix, e.g. ya-nta ‘go!’, thus conforming to a segmental pattern of Walmatjari words. In the Pitjantjatjara dialect of the Wati language, another language form Australia, a word-medial syllable can end with a consonant but a word-final syllable must end with a vowel.^: 14

In most languages, stress may serve a criterion for a phonological word. In languages with a fixed stress, it is possible to ascertain word boundaries from its location. Although it is impossible to predict word boundaries from stress alone in languages with phonemic stress, there will be just one syllable with primary stress per word, which allows for determining the total number of words in an utterance.^: 16

Many phonological rules operate only within a phonological word or specifically across word boundaries. In Hungarian, dental consonants /d/, /t/, /l/ or /n/ assimilate to a following semi-vowel /j/, yielding the corresponding palatal sound, but only within one word. Conversely, external sandhi rules act across word boundaries. The prototypical example of this rule comes from Sanskrit; however, initial consonant mutation in contemporary Celtic languages or the linking r phenomenon in some non-rhotic English dialects can also be used to illustrate word boundaries.^: 17

It is often the case that a phonological word does not correspond to our intuitive conception of a word. The Finnish compound word pääkaupunki ‘capital’ is phonologically two words (pää ‘head’ and kaupunki ‘city’) because it does not conform to Finnish patterns of vowel harmony within words. Conversely, a single phonological word may be made up of more than one syntactical elements, such as in the English phrase I’ll come, where I’ll forms one phonological word.^: 13:618

Lexemes

A word can be thought of as an item in a speaker’s internal lexicon; this is called a lexeme. Nevertheless, it is considered different from a word used in everyday speech, since it is assumed to also include inflected forms. Therefore, the lexeme teapot refers to the singular teapot as well as the plural, teapots. There is also the question to what extent should inflected or compounded words be included in a lexeme, especially in agglutinative languages. For example, there is little doubt that in Turkish the lexeme for house should include nominative singular ev or plural evler. However, it is not clear if it should also encompass the word evlerinizden ‘from your houses’, formed through regular suffixation. There are also lexemes such as «black and white» or «do-it-yourself», which, although consist of multiple words, still form a single collocation with a set meaning.^: 13:618

Grammar

Grammatical words are proposed to consist of a number of grammatical elements which occur together (not in separate places within a clause) in a fixed order and have a set meaning. However, there are exceptions to all of these criteria.^: 19

Single grammatical words have a fixed internal structure; when the structure is changed, the meaning of the word also changes. In Dyirbal, which can use many derivational affixes with its nouns, there are the dual suffix -jarran and the suffix -gabun meaning «another». With the noun yibi they can be arranged into yibi-jarran-gabun («another two women») or yibi-gabun-jarran («two other women») but changing the suffix order also changes their meaning. Speakers of a language also usually associate a specific meaning with a word and not a single morpheme. For example, when asked to talk about untruthfulness they rarely focus on the meaning of morphemes such as -th or -ness.^: 19-20

Semantics

Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of «Minimal Free Forms» in 1928. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves.^: 11 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).^: 77 Some semanticists have put forward a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, indefinable words representing fundamental concepts that are intuitively meaningful. According to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations.

Features

In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words (also called lexical items in the literature) are construed as «bundles» of linguistic features that are united into a structure with form and meaning.^: 36–37 For example, the word «koalas» has semantic features (it denotes real-world objects, koalas), category features (it is a noun), number features (it is plural and must agree with verbs, pronouns, and demonstratives in its domain), phonological features (it is pronounced a certain way), etc.

Orthography

In languages with a literary tradition, the question of what is considered a single word is influenced by orthography. Word separators, typically spaces and punctuation marks are common in modern orthography of languages using alphabetic scripts, but these are a relatively modern development in the history of writing. In character encoding, word segmentation depends on which characters are defined as word dividers. In English orthography, compound expressions may contain spaces. For example, ice cream, air raid shelter and get up each are generally considered to consist of more than one word (as each of the components are free forms, with the possible exception of get), and so is no one, but the similarly compounded someone and nobody are considered single words.

Sometimes, languages which are close grammatically will consider the same order of words in different ways. For example, reflexive verbs in the French infinitive are separate from their respective particle, e.g. se laver («to wash oneself»), whereas in Portuguese they are hyphenated, e.g. lavar-se, and in Spanish they are joined, e.g. lavarse.

Not all languages delimit words expressly. Mandarin Chinese is a highly analytic language with few inflectional affixes, making it unnecessary to delimit words orthographically. However, there are many multiple-morpheme compounds in Mandarin, as well as a variety of bound morphemes that make it difficult to clearly determine what constitutes a word.^: 56 Japanese uses orthographic cues to delimit words, such as switching between kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese writing) and the two kana syllabaries. This is a fairly soft rule, because content words can also be written in hiragana for effect, though if done extensively spaces are typically added to maintain legibility. Vietnamese orthography, although using the Latin alphabet, delimits monosyllabic morphemes rather than words.

Word boundaries

The task of defining what constitutes a «word» involves determining where one word ends and another word begins, that is identifying word boundaries. There are several 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, or fail to separate two or more closely linked words (e.g. «to a» in «He went to a house»).
• 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 My family and I 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.
• 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):^: 9 the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. Nevertheless, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.
• Orthographic boundaries: Word separators, such as spaces and punctuation marks can be used to distinguish single words. However, this depends on a specific language. East-asian writing systems often do not separate their characters. This is the case with Chinese, Japanese writing, which use logographic characters, as well as Thai and Lao, which are abugidas.

Morphology

Morphology is the study of word formation and structure. Words may undergo different morphological processes which are traditionally classified into two broad groups: derivation and inflection. Derivation is a process in which a new word is created from existing ones, often with a change of meaning. For example, in English the verb to convert may be modified into the noun a convert through stress shift and into the adjective convertible through affixation. Inflection adds grammatical information to a word, such as indicating case, tense, or gender.^: 73

In synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, love) may inflect to have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However, for some purposes these are not usually considered to be different words, but rather different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes.

In Indo-European languages in particular, the morphemes distinguished are:

• The root.
• Optional suffixes.
• A inflectional suffix.

Thus, the Proto-Indo-European *wr̥dhom would be analyzed as consisting of

1. *wr̥-, the zero grade of the root *wer-.
2. A root-extension *-dh- (diachronically a suffix), resulting in a complex root *wr̥dh-.
3. The thematic suffix *-o-.
4. The neuter gender nominative or accusative singular suffix *-m.

Definitions and meanings

Since the beginning of the study of linguistics, numerous attempts at defining what a word is have been made, with many different criteria. However, no satisfying definition has yet been found to apply to all languages and at all levels of linguistic analysis. It is, however, possible to find consistent definitions of «word» at different levels of description.^: 6 These include definitions on the phonetic and phonological level, that it is the smallest segment of sound that can be theoretically isolated by word accent and boundary markers; on the orthographic level as a segment indicated by blank spaces in writing or print; on the basis of morphology as the basic element of grammatical paradigms like inflection, different from word-forms; within semantics as the smallest and relatively independent carrier of meaning in a lexicon; and syntactically, as the smallest permutable and substitutable unit of a sentence.^: 1285

In some languages, these different types of words coincide and one can analyze, for example, a «phonological word» as essentially the same as «grammatical word». However, in other languages they may correspond to elements of different size.^: 1 Much of the difficulty stems from the eurocentric bias, as languages from outside of Europe may not follow the intuitions of European scholars. Some of the criteria for «word» developed can only be applicable to languages of broadly European synthetic structure.^: 1-3 Because of this unclear status, some linguists propose avoiding the term «word» altogether, instead focusing on better defined terms such as morphemes.

Dictionaries categorize a language’s lexicon into individually listed forms called lemmas. These can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a «word» in the opinion of the writers of that language. This written form of a word constitutes a lexeme.^: 670-671 The most appropriate means of measuring the length of a word is by counting its syllables or morphemes. When a word has multiple definitions or multiple senses, it may result in confusion in a debate or discussion.

Phonology

One distinguishable meaning of the term «word» can be defined on phonological grounds. It is a unit larger or equal to a syllable, which can be distinguished based on segmental or prosodic features, or through its interactions with phonological rules. In Walmatjari, an Australian language, roots or suffixes may have only one syllable but a phonologic word must have at least two syllables. A disyllabic verb root may take a zero suffix, e.g. luwa-ø ‘hit!’, but a monosyllabic root must take a suffix, e.g. ya-nta ‘go!’, thus conforming to a segmental pattern of Walmatjari words. In the Pitjantjatjara dialect of the Wati language, another language form Australia, a word-medial syllable can end with a consonant but a word-final syllable must end with a vowel.^: 14

In most languages, stress may serve a criterion for a phonological word. In languages with a fixed stress, it is possible to ascertain word boundaries from its location. Although it is impossible to predict word boundaries from stress alone in languages with phonemic stress, there will be just one syllable with primary stress per word, which allows for determining the total number of words in an utterance.^: 16

Many phonological rules operate only within a phonological word or specifically across word boundaries. In Hungarian, dental consonants /d/, /t/, /l/ or /n/ assimilate to a following semi-vowel /j/, yielding the corresponding palatal sound, but only within one word. Conversely, external sandhi rules act across word boundaries. The prototypical example of this rule comes from Sanskrit; however, initial consonant mutation in contemporary Celtic languages or the linking r phenomenon in some non-rhotic English dialects can also be used to illustrate word boundaries.^: 17

It is often the case that a phonological word does not correspond to our intuitive conception of a word. The Finnish compound word pääkaupunki ‘capital’ is phonologically two words (pää ‘head’ and kaupunki ‘city’) because it does not conform to Finnish patterns of vowel harmony within words. Conversely, a single phonological word may be made up of more than one syntactical elements, such as in the English phrase I’ll come, where I’ll forms one phonological word.^: 13:618

Lexemes

A word can be thought of as an item in a speaker’s internal lexicon; this is called a lexeme. Nevertheless, it is considered different from a word used in everyday speech, since it is assumed to also include inflected forms. Therefore, the lexeme teapot refers to the singular teapot as well as the plural, teapots. There is also the question to what extent should inflected or compounded words be included in a lexeme, especially in agglutinative languages. For example, there is little doubt that in Turkish the lexeme for house should include nominative singular ev or plural evler. However, it is not clear if it should also encompass the word evlerinizden ‘from your houses’, formed through regular suffixation. There are also lexemes such as «black and white» or «do-it-yourself», which, although consist of multiple words, still form a single collocation with a set meaning.^: 13:618

Grammar

Grammatical words are proposed to consist of a number of grammatical elements which occur together (not in separate places within a clause) in a fixed order and have a set meaning. However, there are exceptions to all of these criteria.^: 19

Single grammatical words have a fixed internal structure; when the structure is changed, the meaning of the word also changes. In Dyirbal, which can use many derivational affixes with its nouns, there are the dual suffix -jarran and the suffix -gabun meaning «another». With the noun yibi they can be arranged into yibi-jarran-gabun («another two women») or yibi-gabun-jarran («two other women») but changing the suffix order also changes their meaning. Speakers of a language also usually associate a specific meaning with a word and not a single morpheme. For example, when asked to talk about untruthfulness they rarely focus on the meaning of morphemes such as -th or -ness.^: 19-20

Semantics

Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of «Minimal Free Forms» in 1928. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves.^: 11 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).^: 77 Some semanticists have put forward a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, indefinable words representing fundamental concepts that are intuitively meaningful. According to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations.

Features

In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words (also called lexical items in the literature) are construed as «bundles» of linguistic features that are united into a structure with form and meaning.^: 36–37 For example, the word «koalas» has semantic features (it denotes real-world objects, koalas), category features (it is a noun), number features (it is plural and must agree with verbs, pronouns, and demonstratives in its domain), phonological features (it is pronounced a certain way), etc.

Orthography

In languages with a literary tradition, the question of what is considered a single word is influenced by orthography. Word separators, typically spaces and punctuation marks are common in modern orthography of languages using alphabetic scripts, but these are a relatively modern development in the history of writing. In character encoding, word segmentation depends on which characters are defined as word dividers. In English orthography, compound expressions may contain spaces. For example, ice cream, air raid shelter and get up each are generally considered to consist of more than one word (as each of the components are free forms, with the possible exception of get), and so is no one, but the similarly compounded someone and nobody are considered single words.

Sometimes, languages which are close grammatically will consider the same order of words in different ways. For example, reflexive verbs in the French infinitive are separate from their respective particle, e.g. se laver («to wash oneself»), whereas in Portuguese they are hyphenated, e.g. lavar-se, and in Spanish they are joined, e.g. lavarse.

Not all languages delimit words expressly. Mandarin Chinese is a highly analytic language with few inflectional affixes, making it unnecessary to delimit words orthographically. However, there are many multiple-morpheme compounds in Mandarin, as well as a variety of bound morphemes that make it difficult to clearly determine what constitutes a word.^: 56 Japanese uses orthographic cues to delimit words, such as switching between kanji (characters borrowed from Chinese writing) and the two kana syllabaries. This is a fairly soft rule, because content words can also be written in hiragana for effect, though if done extensively spaces are typically added to maintain legibility. Vietnamese orthography, although using the Latin alphabet, delimits monosyllabic morphemes rather than words.

Word boundaries

The task of defining what constitutes a «word» involves determining where one word ends and another word begins, that is identifying word boundaries. There are several 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, or fail to separate two or more closely linked words (e.g. «to a» in «He went to a house»).
• 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 My family and I 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.
• 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):^: 9 the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. Nevertheless, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.
• Orthographic boundaries: Word separators, such as spaces and punctuation marks can be used to distinguish single words. However, this depends on a specific language. East-asian writing systems often do not separate their characters. This is the case with Chinese, Japanese writing, which use logographic characters, as well as Thai and Lao, which are abugidas.

«independently»]]

Philosophy

Philosophers have found words to be objects of fascination since at least the 5th century BC, with the foundation of the philosophy of language. Plato analyzed words in terms of their origins and the sounds making them up, concluding that there was some connection between sound and meaning, though words change a great deal over time. John Locke wrote that the use of words «is to be sensible marks of ideas», though they are chosen «not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea». Wittgenstein’s thought transitioned from a word as representation of meaning to «the meaning of a word is its use in the language.»

Classes

Each word belongs to a category, based on shared grammatical properties. Typically, a language’s lexicon may be classified into several such groups of words. The total number of categories as well as their types are not universal and vary among languages. For example, English has a group of words called articles, such as the (the definite article) or a (the indefinite article), which mark definiteness or identifiability. This class is not present in Japanese, which depends on context to indicate this difference. On the other hand, Japanese has a class of words called particles which are used to mark noun phrases according to their grammatical function or thematic relation, which English marks using word order or prosody.^: 21–24

It is not clear if any categories other than interjection are universal parts of human language. The basic bipartite division that is ubiquitous in natural languages is that of nouns vs verbs. However, in some Wakashan and Salish languages, all content words may be understood as verbal in nature. In Lushootseed, a Salish language, all words with ‘noun-like’ meanings can be used predicatively, where they function like verb. For example, the word sbiaw can be understood as ‘(is a) coyote’ rather than simply ‘coyote’.^: 13:631 On the other hand, in Eskimo–Aleut languages all content words can be analyzed as nominal, with agentive nouns serving the role closest to verbs. Finally, in some Austronesian languages it is not clear whether the distinction is applicable and all words can be best described as interjections which can perform the roles of other categories.^: 13:631

The current classification of words into classes is based on the work of Dionysius Thrax, who, in the 1st century BC, distinguished eight categories of Ancient Greek words: noun, verb, participle, article, pronoun, preposition, adverb, and conjunction. Later Latin authors, Apollonius Dyscolus and Priscian, applied his framework to their own language; since Latin has no articles, they replaced this class with interjection. Adjectives (‘happy’), quantifiers (‘few’), and numerals (‘eleven’) were not made separate in those classifications due to their morphological similarity to nouns in Latin and Ancient Greek. They were recognized as distinct categories only when scholars started studying later European languages.^: 13:629

In Indian grammatical tradition, Pāṇini introduced a similar fundamental classification into a nominal (nāma, suP) and a verbal (ākhyāta, tiN) class, based on the set of suffixes taken by the word. Some words can be controversial, such as slang in formal contexts; misnomers, due to them not meaning what they would imply; or polysemous words, due to the potential confusion between their various senses.

History

In ancient Greek and Roman grammatical tradition, the word was the basic unit of analysis. Different grammatical forms of a given lexeme were studied; however, there was no attempt to decompose them into morphemes. ^: 70 This may have been the result of the synthetic nature of these languages, where the internal structure of words may be harder to decode than in analytic languages. There was also no concept of different kinds of words, such as grammatical or phonological – the word was considered a unitary construct.^: 269 The word (dictiō) was defined as the minimal unit of an utterance (ōrātiō), the expression of a complete thought.^: 70

See also

• Longest words
• Utterance
• Word (computer architecture)
• Word count, the number of words in a document or passage of text
• Wording
• Etymology

In traditional grammar, word is the basic unit of language.A word refers to a speech sound, or a mixture of two or more speech sounds in both written and verbal form of language. A word works as a symbol to represent/refer to something/someone in language to communicate a specific meaning.

What is word and its example?

The definition of a word is a letter or group of letters that has meaning when spoken or written. An example of a word is dog.An example of words are the seventeen sets of letters that are written to form this sentence.

What is word and its types?

There are eight types of words that are often referred to as ‘word classes’ or ‘parts of speech’ and are commonly distinguished in English: nouns, determiners, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions.These are the different types of words in the English language.

What is word linguistics?

In linguistics, a word of a spoken language can be defined as the smallest sequence of phonemes that can be uttered in isolation with objective or practical meaning.In many languages, the notion of what constitutes a “word” may be learned as part of learning the writing system.

What is the meaning of word?

1 : a sound or combination of sounds that has meaning and is spoken by a human being. 2 : a written or printed letter or letters standing for a spoken word. 3 : a brief remark or conversation I’d like a word with you.

What are words called?

All words belong to categories called word classes (or parts of speech) according to the part they play in a sentence. The main word classes in English are listed below. Noun. Verb. Adjective.

What is word in language?

A word is a speech sound or a combination of sounds, or its representation in writing, that symbolizes and communicates a meaning and may consist of a single morpheme or a combination of morphemes. The branch of linguistics that studies word structures is called morphology.

A word class is a group of words that have the same basic behaviour, for example nouns, adjectives, or verbs.

Why do we define words?

The definition of definition is “a statement expressing the essential nature of something.” At least that’s one way Webster defines the word.Because definitions enable us to have a common understanding of a word or subject; they allow us to all be on the same page when discussing or reading about an issue.

Why do we say word?

‘Word’ in slang is a word one would use to indicate acknowledgement, approval, recognition or affirmation, of something somebody else just said.

What is morpheme and word?

Word vs Morpheme
A morpheme is usually considered as the smallest element of a word or else a grammar element, whereas a word is a complete meaningful element of language.

What is word Slideshare?

•“A word’ is a free morpheme or a combination of morphemes that together form a basic segment of speech” .

Is word a noun or verb?

word used as a noun:
A distinct unit of language (sounds in speech or written letters) with a particular meaning, composed of one or more morphemes, and also of one or more phonemes that determine its sound pattern. A distinct unit of language which is approved by some authority.

What are the parts of a word?

The parts of a word are called morphemes. These include suffixes, prefixes and root words. Take the word ‘microbiology,’ for example.

What is word Wikipedia?

A word is something spoken by the mouth, that can be pronounced. In alphabetic writing, it is a collection of letters used together to communicate a meaning. These can also usually be pronounced.Some words have different pronunciation, for example, ‘wind’ (the noun) and ‘wind’ (the verb) are pronounced differently.

What type of word is there?

The word “there” have multiple functions. In verbal and written English, the word can be used as an adverb, a pronoun, a noun, an interjection, or an adjective. This word is classified as an adverb if it is used to modify a verb in the sentence.

What is word boundaries?

A word boundary is a zero-width test between two characters. To pass the test, there must be a word character on one side, and a non-word character on the other side. It does not matter which side each character appears on, but there must be one of each.

What is called sentence?

A sentence is a set of words that are put together to mean something. A sentence is the basic unit of language which expresses a complete thought. It does this by following the grammatical basic rules of syntax.A complete sentence has at least a subject and a main verb to state (declare) a complete thought.

Is your name a word?

Yes, names are words. Specifically, they are proper nouns: they refer to specific people, places, or things. “John” is a proper noun; “ground” is a common noun. But both are words.

What are the 4 main word classes?

There are four major word classes: verb, noun, adjective, adverb.

What is word class in syntax?

In English grammar, a word class is a set of words that display the same formal properties, especially their inflections and distribution.It is also variously called grammatical category, lexical category, and syntactic category (although these terms are not wholly or universally synonymous).