Chapter 2

What is a word?
2.1
INTRODUCTION

Often we find it very difficult to give a clear and systematic account of

everyday things, ideas, actions and events that surround us. We just take them
for granted. We rarely need to state in an accurate and articulate manner what
they are really like. For instance, we all know what a game is. Yet, as the
philosopher Wittgenstein showed, we find it very difficult to state explicitly
what the simple word game means.
The same is true of the term word. We use words all the time. We intuitively
know what the words in our language are. Nevertheless most of us would be
hard pushed to explain to anyone what kind of object a word is. If a couple of
Martian explorers (with a rudimentary understanding of English) came off their
space-ship and stopped you in the street to enquire what earthlings meant by the
term WORD what would you tell them? I suspect you might be somewhat
vague and evasive. Although you know very well what words are, you might
find it difficult to express explicitly and succinctly what it is that you know
about them.

The purpose of this chapter is to try to find an answer to the question: what is
a word? It is not only Martian explorers curious about the way earthlings live
who might want to know what words are. We too have an interest in
understanding words because they play such an important role in our lives. As
we saw in the last chapter, it is impossible to imagine human society without
language. And equally, it is impossible to imagine a human language that has no
words of any kind. It is impossible to understand the nature of language without
gaining some understanding of the nature of words. So, in this chapter we will
clarify what we mean when we use the term 'word'. This clarification is
essential if our investigations are to make any headway for, as you will see
presently, we mean quite a few very different things when we talk of words.

A standard definition of the word is found in a paper written in 1926 by the

American linguist Leonard Bloomfield, one of the greatest linguists of the
twentieth century. According to Bloomfield, 'a minimum free form is a word'.
By this he meant that the word is the smallest meaningful linguistic unit that can
be used on its own. It is a form that cannot be divided into any smaller units that
can be used independently to convey meaning. For example child is a word. We
cannot divide it up into smaller units that can convey meaning when they stand
alone.
Contrast this with the word childish which can be analysed into child- and -
ish. While the child bit of childish is meaningful when used on its own (and
hence is a word), the same is not true of -ish. Although according to the Oxford
English Dictionary (OED) -ish means something like having the (objectionable)
qualities of (as in mannish, womanish, devilish, sheepish, apish etc.), there is no
way we can use it on its the meaning of 'someone who does whatever the verb
means'. Given the verb tickoff, a ticker-off must be a person who ticks off.
Similarly, if you know what established words like handful, cupful and spoonful
mean, you are also able to figure out the meanings of novel words like fountain-
penful (as in a fountain-penful of ink) or hovercraftful (as in hovercraftful after
hovercraftful of English shoppers returned from Calais loaded down with
cigarettes, cheese and plonk). Virtually any noun denoting a container can have
–ful added to it in order to indicate that it is 'full of something'.

To take another example, a number of words ending in -ist, many of which

have come into use in recent years, refer to people who discriminate against, or
hold negative views about, certain less powerful subgroups in society, e.g.
racist, sexist. Anyone who knows what racist and sexist mean, given the right
context should have no difficulty in understanding the nature of discrimination
perpetrated by people who are described using the novel words ageist, sizist and
speechist. Ageism is discrimination on grounds of (old) age --for instance,
denying employment to people over the age of 60; sizism is discrimination
(usually against fat people) on grounds of size and speechism is discrimination
against people with speech impediments like stuttering.

Did you notice how I exploited your tacit knowledge of the fact that words
ending in -ist and –ism complement each other? You were glad to accept
ageism, sizism and speechism because you know that corresponding to an
adjective ending in -ist there will normally be a noun ending in -ism. This is
important. It shows that you know that certain word-forming bits go together
and others do not. I suspect that you would reject putative words like *agement,
*sizement and *speechment. (An asterisk is used conventionally to indicate that
a form is disallowed.) In word-formation it is not a case of anything goes.
A challenging question which morphology addresses is, how do speakers know
which non-occurring or non-established words are permissible and which ones
are not? Why are the words fountainpenful, hovercraftful and speechist allowed
while *agement, *speechment and *sizement are not?
Morphological theory provides a general theory of wordformation applicable
to any language but, as mentioned earlier, this book focuses on word-formation
in English. Its objective is to provide a description of English words designed to
make explicit the various things speakers know, albeit in an unconscious
manner, about English words. The emphasis will be on the description of
English words rather than the elaboration of morphological theory. So, data and
facts about English words are brought to the fore and the theoretical and
methodological issues are kept in the background for the most part. The use of
formal notation has also been kept to a minimum in order to keep the account
simple.

1.2
OVERVIEW OF COMING CHAPTER

At the very outset we need to establish the nature of the subject we are going
to be examining. So, Chapter 2 discusses the nature of words. Then the next
three chapters delve deep inside words and investigate their internal structure. In
the process, traditional morphological concepts of structural linguistics are
introduced and extensively exemplified.
Morphology is not a stand-alone module. After the introductory chapters, in
Chapter 6 you are introduced to a theory where morphology is an integral part
of the LEXICON or DICTIONARY. This chapter focuses on the interaction of
phonology and morphology in word-formation.
Chapter 7 explores the relationship between words in speech and in writing.
What is the relationship between saying words and writing them down? Is
writing simply a mirror of speech-and an apparently distorting one in the case of
English?
`acrobat a`nnoying ca` hoots

`kingfisher de` molish gaber `dine

`patriarchate Chau` cerian hullaba `loo

Main stress can fall on only one syllable in a word. The location of main stress
is part of the make-up of a word and is not changed capriciously by individual
speakers. You cannot decide to stress hullabaloo on the penultimate syllable on
a Monday (hulla `baloo), on the antepenultimate syllable on a Tuesday
(hu'llabaloo), on the initial syllable on a Wednesday (`hullabaloo) and on the
final syllable for the rest of the week (hullaba` loo).

However, in some cases, if we wish to contrast two related words, we can shift
stress from its normal position to a new position. This can be seen in `vendor
and ven dee which normally are stressed on the first and second syllable
respectively. But if the speaker wants to contrast these two words both words
might be stressed on the final syllable as I heard an estate agent do in a radio
interview.

It is ven`dor, not the ven`dee who pays that tax.

This example illustrates well the point that a word is allowed just one stress.
Stress can be shifted from one syllable to another, but a word cannot have two
main stresses. We could not have *`ve`dor and `ven`dee where the two syllables
received equal stress. Stress has to do with relative prominence. The syllable
that receives main stress is somewhat more prominent than the rest, some of
which may be unstressed or weakly stressed. By contrast, function words are
normally unstressed. We can say Nelly went to town with no stress on to unless
we wish to highlight to for contrastive purposes, e.g. Nelly went to town and not
far away from town).

It is easy to see how stress can function as a valuable clue in determining

whether two content words are a single compound word or two separate words.
The nouns street and lamp are both stressed when they occur in isolation. But if
they appear in the compound 'street-lamp, only the first is stressed. The stress
on lamp is suppressed.
Stress is not the only phonological clue. In addition to stress, there are rules
regulating the positions in which various sounds may occur in a word and the
combinations of sounds that are permissible. These rules are called
PHONOTACTIC RULES. They can help us to know whether we are at the
beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word. A phonological word must
satisfy the requirements for words of the spoken language. For instance, while
any vowel can begin a word, and most consonants can appear alone at the
beginning of a word, the consonant [] is subject to certain restrictions. (This
consonant is spelled ng as in long (see the Key to symbols used on p. xix). In
English words [] is not allowed to occur initially although it can occur in other
positions. Thus, [ ] is allowed internally and at the end of a word as in [ I ]
longing and [1 ge] longer. But you could not have an English word like ngether,
*[ee] with [ ] as its first sound. However, in other languages this sound may be
found word-initially as in the Chinese name Nga [a] and the Zimbabwean name
Nkomo [ komo].

There are also phonotactic restrictions on the combination of consonants in

various positions in a word in the spoken language. As everyone knows, English
spelling is not always a perfect mirror of pronunciation. So when considering
words in the spoken language it is important to separate spelling from
pronunciation (cf. Chapter 7). You know that He is knock-kneed is
pronounced /hI Iz nk ni:d/ and not */he Is knk kni:d/. A particular combination
of letters can be associated with very different pronunciations in different words
or