IV. The problem of word boundaries
III. The Word As the Basic Lexical Unit
To describe a word 1st of all let’s say that the word is a unit of language uniting meaning and form, it is composed of one or more morphemes, each consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation. Lexicology studies not only words but also morphemes as units that make up words and word combinations as groups that words form.
Unlike a phoneme, a word is a two-facet unit (двухсторонняя единица языка), that has both form and content.
The form (sound form, звуковая оболочка, план выражения) is a certain arrangement of phonemes, a certain arrangement of morphemes and a unifying lexical stress.
The content(content plane, meaning, semantics – значение, план содержания) – consists of gram. and lex. meaning, with which this cluster of phonemes is associated in this given language.
Unlike morpheme, the word is a positionally mobile unit that can occupy different places in the utterance.
Unlike a word combinationthe word is a global, indivisible unit (глобальная, целостная единица, нерасчленимая). It is indivisible both formally and semantically.
Definition of word by I.V. Arnold:a word is the smallest significant unit of a given language capable of functioning alone and characterised by positional mobility within a sentence, morphological uninterruptability and semantic integrity
The difference between words and other two-facet units is not always clear. One of the problems is the size-of-unit problem (проблема отдельности слова) that of separateness and separability in the syntagmatic aspect – that is, in the flow of speech.
There are some controversial units of speech
- Form words. On the one hand, they fuse with notional words phonetically and do not function as sentence-members. On the other hand, they are positionally mobile, e.g. a, to, and.
- Loose compounds, e.g. speech sound, stone wall. On the one hand, they are built in speech. On the other hand, they have one lexical stress. And their spelling is double or even triple – it in some cases may be hyphenated, with a space or without a space.
- Phrasal words: his I-love-you‘s. On the one hand, they are built in speech and are not reproducible. On the other, they have one lexical stress.
Another problem connected with the paradigmatic aspect of word boundary is the Identity-of-unit problem (тождества слова).Form & content of different words don’t always form one-to-one relations. They interrelate through phenomena of polysemy, homonymy, synonymy and variants of a word.
Within the language system the word is a lexeme – an abstract unit which unites all its variants, its material realizations in speech (the same as phoneme and speech sounds):
a) lexico-semantic variants – different meanings of the same polysemantic word: to give a pen, to give a smile, to give an answer;
b) phonetic variants – different pronouncation of the same word: neither, either;
c) orthographic variants – different spelling of the same word: jail – gaol;
d) morphological variants – different morphemic structure of the same word: learned – learnt, geographic – geographical.