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Word and Meaning /english/

Moscow State Linguistic University

Department of Humanity and applied sciences

Theme: Word and Meaning

MOSCOW 2000

The word may be described as the basic 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. The combinations of morphemes within words are subject to certain linking conditions. When a derivational suffix is added a new word is formed, thus, 'listen' and 'listener' are different words.

When used in sentences together with other words they are syntactically organized. But if we look at the language 'speech', it becomes apparent that words are not neatly segmented as they are by spaces in graphological realization. The pauses in speech do not consistently correspond with word-endings; many languages, including English, do not make it clear to a foreign listener where the utterance is divided into words.

The definition of a word is one of the most difficult in linguistics because the simplest word has many aspects. All attempts to characterize the word are necessarily specific for each domain of science and are therefore considered one-sided by the representatives of all the other domains and criticized for incompletness. The variants of definitions were so numerous that some authors collecting them produced works of impressive scope and bulk.

A few examples will suffice to show that any definition is conditioned by the aims and interests of its author.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), one of the great English philosophers, revealed a materialistic approach to the problem of nomination when he wrote that words are not mere sounds but names of matter. Three centuries later the great Russian physiologist I.P. Pavlov (1849-1936) examined the word in connection with his studies of the second signal system, and defined it as a universal signal that can be substitute any other signal from the environment in evoking a response in a human organism. One of the latest developments of science and engineering is machine translation. It also deals with words and requires a rigorous definition for them. It runs as follows: a word is a sequence of graphemes which can occur between spaces, or the representation of such a sequence on morphemic level.

Within the scope of linguistics the word has been defined syntactically, semantically, phonologically and by combining various approaches.

It has been syntactically defined for instance as 'the minimum sentence' by H.Sweet and much later by L.Bloomfield as a 'minimum free form' - the smallest unit of meaning that can exist in isolation, but this does not help us unreservedly. Is 'newspaper-seller' a word, or 'petrol-station', or computer-programmer? They certainly convey bits of meaning which we do not automatically break into smaller units when we meet them in common use. So too we can make total response to the epithets in Joyce's phrase 'the bbullockbefriending bard' or Shakespear's 'world without end hour', although they do not follow the regular adjective pattern. At the other extreme, we may regard an affix as less than a word. Yet people will speak confidently about 'different isms and ologies', or respond to a sentence like, 'Some were in favour of the idea, but most were very anti,', without filing a complaint of deviance.

Again, in an attempt to make a count of all present-day English, how do we asses the set 'teach', 'teaching', 'teacher', 'teachable', to say nothing of the change 'taught'? If a foreigner learns the form 'teach' and has some knowledge of methods of word-formation, how many words has he learned? Even more important, how many words has he learned in recognizing as units the sequence of sounds which are written down s 'pipe', 'match', 'box', 'balance'? For each of these, and for many other 'words', the dictionary offers a number of apparently different meanings.

E. Sapir takes into consideration the syntactic and semantic aspects when he calls the word 'one of the smallest completely satisfying bits of isolated 'meaning', into which the sentence resolves itself.' Sapir also points out one more, very important characteristic of the word, its indivisibility: 'It cannot be cut into without a disturbance of meaning, one or two other or both of the several parts remaining as a helpless waif on our hands.' The essence of indivisibility will be clear from a comparison of the article 'a' and the prefix '-a' in 'a lion' and 'alive'.  'A lion' is a word-group because we can separate its elements and insert other words between them: 'a living lion', 'a dead lion'. 'Alive' is a word: it is individual, i.e. structurally impermeable: nothing can be inserted between its elements. The morpheme 'a' is not free, is not a word. The situation becomes more complicated if we cannot be guided by solid spelling. 'The Oxford English Dictionary', for instance, does not include the reciprocal pronouns 'each other' and 'one another' under separate headings, although they should certainly be analyzed as word-units, not as word-groups since they have become indivisible: we now say 'with each other' and 'with one another' instead of the older forms 'one with another or each with the other'. [2]

'Altogether' is one word according to its spelling, but how is one to treat 'all right', which is rather a similar combination?

When discussing the internal cohesion of the word the English linguist John Lyons points out that it should be discussed in terms of two criteria 'positional mobility' and 'uninterruptability'. To illustrate the first he segments into morphemes the following sentence:

Slow - ly - the - boy - s - walk - ed - up - the - hill

Up - the - hill - slow - ly - walk - ed - the - boy - s

Yet under all the permutations certain groups of morphemes behave as 'blocks' - they occur always together, and in the same order relative to one another. There is no possibility of the sequence s - the - boy, ly - slow, ed -walk.  According to John Lyons - 'One of the characteristics of the word is that it tends to be internally stable (in terms of the order of the component morphemes), but positionally mobile (permutable wit other words in the same sentence)'.

A purely semantic treatment will be found in Stephen Ulmann's explanation: with him connected discourse, if analyzed from the semantic point of view, 'will fall into a certain number of meaningful segments which are ultimately compose of meaningful units. These meaningful units are called words.'

Th semantic-phonological approach may be illustrated by A.H. Gardiner's definition:

'A word is an articulate sound-symbol in its aspect of denoting something which is spoken about.'

The eminent French linguist A. Meillet combines the semantic, phonological and grammatical criteria and gives the following definition of the word:

'A word is defined by the association of a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment.'

This formula can be accepted with some modifications adding that a word is the smallest significant unit of a given language capable of functioning alone and characterized by positional mobility within a sentence, morphological uninterruptability and semantic integrity. All these criteria are necessary because they permit us to create basis for the oppositions between the word and the phrase, the word and the phoneme, and the word and the morpheme: their common feature is that they are all