INTRODUCTION TO MORPHOLOGY

& 6. There exist many definitions of the term word and none of them is generally accepted. But in the majority of cases people actually experience no difficulty in separating one word from another in their native tongue.

Linguists point out as most characteristic features of words their isolatability (a word may become a sentence: Boys! Where? Certainly), uninterruptibility (a word is not easily interrupted by a parenthetical expression as a sequence of words may be; comp. black – that is bluish-black – birds where bluish-black may not be inserted in the middle of the compound blackbird), a certain looseness in reference to the place in a sequence (cf. the parts of un-gentle-man-li-ness versus away in Away he ran. He ran away. Away ran he.), etc. This is reflected in writing where the graphic form of almost every word is separated by intervals from its neighbours.

Some difficulty is caused by different applications of the term word. Linguists often apply it to a whole group like write, writes, wrote, will write, has written, etc. All this group is then regarded as one word. But when speaking about every word being separated from its neighbours in speech, we, naturally, mean individual members of such a group, not the group as a whole. The whole group is never used as a unit of speech. Thus we must either distinguish the word as a unit of language and the word as a unit of speech, or we have to choose a unit common to both language and speech and designate it by the term word. In this book the latter course is taken. A unit like write is a word with regard to both language and speech. The group write, writes, wrote, etc. is not a word, but a lexeme, a group of words united by some common features, of which we shall speak later on. (See § 19.)

Date: 2015-02-28; view: 993