Grammar
The idea of a word has been always considered to be of a great importance and has troubled linguists since the beginnings of linguistic studies. There appears to be a problem with defining a word and each definition we may come up with will be likely different to other ones we come across. After decades of quarrels and blood spills linguists agreed on distinguishing four definitions of ‘word’ and those are the ones I will try and explain today. I will also look with you at some special cases and exceptions since nothing is ever easy when it comes to linguistics.
Orthographic word We will start with those since the definition is probably the most obvious to most of us. Orthographic word a unit in writing that has a space at each end and no break in the middle. It’s very easy to pick them out in texts and they don’t exist in speech. According to this definition item such as car park consists of two orthographic words. English spelling rules often dictate where white spaces go but sometimes individual preferences differ resulting in us encountering various spelling versions of the same items. We have for instance both ice cream (two orthographic words) and ice-cream (one orthographic word).
Phonological word Unlike an orthographic word, it’s a piece of speech rather than text and is a single unit of pronunciation. In English one phonological word must contain only one stress. Look at the following sentence to see what I mean: Work is getting lighter now which leaves time to work on updating and filing system. In total the sentence consists of 15 orthographical words. The items that aren’t stressed are: which, to, on, and so the remaining 11 are phonological words that contain a stress each and those have been underlined. To complicate things more, items we stress are called content words such as nouns, principal verbs, adjectives and adverbs whereas the ones we don’t stress we refer to as function words: determiners (the, a, some), auxiliary verbs (look at my previous post Modal Verbs), prepositions (before, under, in), conjunctions (but, and, as) and pronouns (I, she, we).
Lexemes A lexeme is a simple and abstract unit of the vocabulary of a given language and that can be found in a dictionary. A lexeme is represented in speech or writing by one of the possible forms that carries grammatical marking. It basically means that two forms such as house and houses are in fact the same word where the first form indicates singularity and the latter indicates plurality. In the same way a lexeme have can be represented by various forms such as has indicating 3rd person singular, having indicating progressive tense, had indicating past tense and so forth. No lexical item in English has more than five forms apart from the verb be with eight different forms but there are languages out there in which words can have even hundreds of forms.
Grammatical word-forms Quite straightforwardly they’re forms that are assumed by a lexeme for grammatical purposes – house (base form) and houses (inflected form) are grammatical word-forms of a lexeme house whereas have (base form), has, having and had (inflected forms) are grammatical word-forms of a lexeme have and sometimes lexemes simply won’t have numerous grammatical word-forms (e.g. health).
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Grammar
Lost for words?
The idea of a word has been always considered to be of a great importance and has troubled linguists since the beginnings of linguistic studies. There appears to be a problem with defining a word and each definition we may come up with will be likely different to other ones we come across. After decades of quarrels and blood spills linguists agreed on distinguishing four definitions of ‘word’ and those are the ones I will try and explain today. I will also look with you at some special cases and exceptions since nothing is ever easy when it comes to linguistics.
Orthographic word We will start with those since the definition is probably the most obvious to most of us. Orthographic word a unit in writing that has a space at each end and no break in the middle. It’s very easy to pick them out in texts and they don’t exist in speech. According to this definition item such as car park consists of two orthographic words. English spelling rules often dictate where white spaces go but sometimes individual preferences differ resulting in us encountering various spelling versions of the same items. We have for instance both ice cream (two orthographic words) and ice-cream (one orthographic word).
Phonological word Unlike an orthographic word, it’s a piece of speech rather than text and is a single unit of pronunciation. In English one phonological word must contain only one stress. Look at the following sentence to see what I mean: Work is getting lighter now which leaves time to work on updating and filing system. In total the sentence consists of 15 orthographical words. The items that aren’t stressed are: which, to, on, and so the remaining 11 are phonological words that contain a stress each and those have been underlined. To complicate things more, items we stress are called content words such as nouns, principal verbs, adjectives and adverbs whereas the ones we don’t stress we refer to as function words: determiners (the, a, some), auxiliary verbs (look at my previous post Modal Verbs), prepositions (before, under, in), conjunctions (but, and, as) and pronouns (I, she, we).
Grammatical word-forms Quite straightforwardly they’re forms that are assumed by a lexeme for grammatical purposes – house (base form) and houses (inflected form) are grammatical word-forms of a lexeme house whereas have (base form), has, having and had (inflected forms) are grammatical word-forms of a lexeme have and sometimes lexemes simply won’t have numerous grammatical word-forms (e.g. health).
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- Step By Step Grammar 2: Verbs
As mentioned last Wednesday, today we are talking about verbs. The verb is perhaps the most important part of the sentence as the sentence would not exist without the verb! It’s a word that we use to express actions, emotions and beings. In its dictionary...
- Both A Borrower And A Lender Be
I have written an article on word formation processes in the past and the topic has been always close to my heart. I recently tried to do a little research on borrowings and particularly English borrowings in the Polish language. Although I haven’t...
- Modal Verbs
I’ve been thinking about writing this article for quite some time now and, at some point, I even decided to experiment and spend a day at work listening to people speak English only just to try and catch as many modal verbs as possible. I advise...
- Agreement Between Subject And Verb
Listen up, it really is that simple! If a sentence has a singular subject it is followed by a singular verb and if it has a plural subject it is followed by a plural verb. Verb and subject must agree.She likes animals. She like animals. They like...
- Phones, Phonemes And Allophones.
The terminology we will be dealing with today may strike you as really complicated. This is always the case with abstract units that you cannot see or touch. I've made every effort for the text to be simple so don't give up before you even try...