Photo:1
Photo:2
Photo:3
Photo:4
Photo:1 Photo:2 Photo:3 Photo:4 |
| Definitions | |
| 2>
Further information: Lexeme and Lemma (morphology)
The ease or difficulty of deciphering a word depends on the language. Dictionaries categorize a language's lexicon (i.e., its vocabulary) into lemmas. These can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a "word" in the opinion of the writers of that language.
[edit] Tags:Language,Edit,Lemma (morphology),Dictionaries,Lexicon,Lemmas,Lexeme,Lemma,Morphology, | |
| Semantic definition | |
| 3>
Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of "Minimal Free Forms" in 1926. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves.[1] This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms, as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of).[2]
Some semanticists have proposed a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, indefinable words representing fundamental concepts that are intuitively meaningful. According to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations.[3]
[edit] Tags:Semantic,Meaning,Speech,Conceptual,Rime,Phoneme,Concepts, | |
| Features | |
| 3>
In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words (also called lexical items in the literature) are construed as "bundles" of linguistic features that are united into a structure with form and meaning.[4] For example, the word "bears" has semantic features (it denotes real-world objects, bears), category features (it is a noun), number features (it is plural and must agree with verbs, pronouns, and demonstratives in its domain), phonological features (it is pronounced a certain way), etc.
[edit] Tags:Minimalist,Linguistic Features,Bears,Category,Number,Phonological,Nouns,Verbs,Noun,Verb,Pronoun,Lexical Item, | |
| Word boundaries | |
| 3>
The task of defining what constitutes a "word" involves determining where one word ends and another word begins—in other words, identifying word boundaries. There are several ways to determine where the word boundaries of spoken language should be placed:
Potential pause: A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly, allowing for pauses. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words, or fail to separate two or more closely related words.
Indivisibility: A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud, and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become My family and I have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have infixes, which are put inside a word. Similarly, some have separable affixes; in the German sentence "Ich komme gut zu Hause an", the verb ankommen is separated.
Phonetic boundaries: Some languages have particular rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example, in a language that regularly stresses the last syllable of a word, a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony (like Turkish):[5] the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. Nevertheless, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.
Orthographic boundaries: See below.
[edit] Tags:Affixes,Infixes,Separable Affixes,German,Pronunciation,Stresses,Vowel Harmony,Turkish,Defining,Phonetic, | |
| Orthography | |
| 4>
In languages with a literary tradition, there is interrelation between orthography and the question of what is considered a single word. Word separators (typically spaces) are common in modern orthography of languages using alphabetic scripts, but these are (excepting isolated precedents) a relatively modern development (see also history of writing).
In English orthography, compound expressions may contain spaces. Examples are ice cream, air raid shelter, get up, and these must thus be considered as more than one word. (Ice, cream, air etc. indisputably exist as free forms, the case of get is less clear.) In contrast, brownstone is spelt as a single word and would thus be considered as such for most purposes even though brown and stone are free forms.
Vietnamese orthography, although using the Latin alphabet, delimits monosyllabic morphemes, not words. East Asian orthography (languages using CJK characters) also tend to delimit syllables (in the case of Chinese characters) or morae (in the case of kana) rather than full words. Hangul the Korean alphabet, delimits both syllables and words, by grouping graphemes into syllabic blocks but also adds spaces between words. Conversely, synthetic languages often combine many lexical morphemes into single words, making it difficult to boil them down to the traditional sense of words found more easily in analytic languages; this is especially difficult for polysynthetic languages, such as Inuktitut and Ubykh, where entire sentences may consist of a single word.
[edit] Tags:Sentences,Graphemes,Literary Tradition,Orthography,Word Separators,Spaces,Alphabetic Scripts,History Of Writing,English Orthography,Compound,Vietnamese,Cjk Characters,Chinese Characters,Morae,Hangul,Analytic Languages,Polysynthetic Languages,Inuktitut,Ubykh,Synthetic Languages,Morphemes,Morpheme,Grapheme, | |
| Morphology | |
| 2>
Main article: Morphology (linguistics)
Further information: Inflection
In synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, love) may have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However for some purposes these are not usually considered to be different words, but rather different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes. In Indo-European languages in particular, the morphemes distinguished are
the root
optional suffixes
a desinence.
Thus, the Proto-Indo-European *wr̥dhom would be analyzed as consisting of
*wr̥-, the zero grade of the root *wer-
a root-extension *-dh- (diachronically a suffix), resulting in a complex root *wr̥dh-
The thematic suffix *-o-
the neuter gender nominative or accusative singular desinence *-m.
[edit] Tags:Root,Morphology (linguistics),Inflection,Indo-european Languages,Suffixes,Desinence,Zero Grade,Thematic Suffix,Neuter Gender,Article, | |
| Philosophy | |
| 2>
Philosophers have found words objects of fascination since at least the 5th century BC, with the foundation of the philosophy of language. Plato analyzed words in terms of their origins and the sounds making them up, concluding that there was some connection between sound and meaning, though words change a great deal over time. John Locke wrote that the use of words "is to be sensible marks of ideas", though they are chosen "not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea".[6] Wittgenstein's thought transitioned from a word as representation of meaning to "the meaning of a word is its use in the language."[7]
[edit] Tags:Philosophy Of Language,Wittgenstein, | |
| Classes | |
| 2>
Main article: Lexical category
Grammar classifies a language's lexicon into several groups of words. The basic bipartite division possible for virtually every natural language is that of nouns vs. verbs.
The classification into such classes is in the tradition of Dionysius Thrax, who distinguished eight categories: noun, verb, adjective, pronoun, preposition, adverb, conjunction and interjection.
In Indian grammatical tradition, Pāṇini introduced a similar fundamental classification into a nominal (nāma, suP) and a verbal (ākhyāta, tiN) class, based on the set of desinences taken by the word.
[edit] Tags:Lexical Category,Natural Language,Dionysius Thrax,Adjective,Preposition,Adverb,Conjunction,Interjection,Pāṇini,Grammar,Categories, | |
| See also | |
| 2>
Grammar
Lexeme
Lexical item
Lexicon
Lexis (linguistics)
Meaning (linguistics)
Morphology (linguistics)
Speech
Utterance
Longest words
[edit] Tags:Lexis (linguistics),Meaning (linguistics),Utterance,Lexis, | |
| Footnotes | |
| 2>
^ Katamba 11
^ Fleming 77
^ Wierzbicka 1996; Goddard 2002
^ Adger (2003), pp. 36–7.
^ Bauer 9
^ www.rbjones.com/rbjpub/philos/classics/locke/ctb3c02.htm
^ plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein
[edit] Tags: | |
| References | |
| 2>
Adger, David (2003). Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199243700.
Barton, David (1994). Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. Blackwell Publishing. p. 96.
Bauer, Laurie (1983). English Word-formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-28492-9.
Brown, Keith R. (Ed.) (2005) Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (2nd ed.). Elsevier. 14 vols.
Crystal, David (1995). The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1 ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-40179-8.
Fleming, Michael et al. (2001). Meeting the Standards in Secondary English: A Guide to the ITT NC. Routledge. p. 77. ISBN 0415233771.
Goddard, Cliff (2002). "The search for the shared semantic core of all languages". In Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka. Meaning and Universal Grammar: Theory and Empirical Findings. Volume I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. pp. 5–40. http://www.une.edu.au/lcl/nsm/pdf/Goddard_Ch1_2002.pdf
Katamba, Francis (2005). English Words: Structure, History, Usage. Routledge. ISBN 0415298938.
Plag, Ingo (2003). Word-formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-52563-2.
Simpson, J.A. and E.S.C. Weiner, ed (1989). Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Clarendon Press. ISBN 0-198-61186-2.
Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198700024.
[edit] Tags:Dictionary, | |
| External links | |
| 2>
Look up word in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
What Is a Word? – a working paper by Larry Trask (see [1] for attribution), Department of Linguistics and English Language, University of Sussex.
v
d
e
Lexicography
Types of reference works
Dictionary
Glossary
Lexicon
Thesaurus
Types of dictionaries
Bilingual
Biographical
Conceptual
Defining
Electronic
Encyclopedic
Language for specific purposes dictionary
Machine-readable
Maximizing
Medical
Minimizing
Monolingual learner's
Multi-field
Phonetic
Picture
Reverse
Rhyming
Rime
Single-field
Specialized
Sub-field
Visual
Lexicographic projects
Lexigraf
WordNet
Other
List of lexicographers
List of online dictionaries
v
d
e
Lexicology
Major terms
Lexicon
Idiolect
Word
Lexis
Lexical unit
Elements
Morpheme
Grapheme
Glyphs
Phoneme
Sememe
Seme
Lexeme
Lemma
Meronymy
Chereme
Semantic relations
Holonymy
Hyponymy
Troponymy
Idiom
Synonym
Antonymy
Lexical semantics
Semantic net
Fonctions
Function word
Headword
Fields
Morphology
Controlled vocabulary
English lexicology and lexicography
Lexicographic error
Lexicographic information cost
Linguistic prescription
Specialised lexicography
International scientific vocabulary
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Word&oldid=474882154"
Categories: ConceptsLexical unitsSyntactic entitiesUnits of linguistic morphologyWordsHidden categories: Wikipedia indefinitely move-protected pages
Personal tools
Log in / create account
Namespaces
Article
Talk
Variants
Views
Read
Edit
View history
Actions
Search
Navigation
Main page
Contents
Featured content
Current events
Random article
Donate to Wikipedia
Interaction
Help
About Wikipedia
Community portal
Recent changes
Contact Wikipedia
Toolbox
What links here
Related changes
Upload file
Special pages
Permanent link
Cite this page
Print/export
Create a bookDownload as PDFPrintable version
Languages
العربية
Aragonés
Asturianu
Azərbaycanca
Башҡортса
Беларуская
Беларуская (тарашкевіца)
Bosanski
Brezhoneg
Български
Català
Чӑвашла
Česky
Cymraeg
Dansk
Deutsch
Eesti
Español
Esperanto
Euskara
فارسی
Fiji Hindi
Føroyskt
Français
Frysk
Galego
贛語
한국어
Hrvatski
Ido
Bahasa Indonesia
Interlingua
Ирон
Íslenska
Italiano
עברית
Къарачай-Малкъар
ქართული
Қазақша
Kiswahili
Kreyòl ayisyen
Kurdî
Latina
Latviešu
Lietuvių
Lingála
Magyar
Македонски
Malagasy
മലയാളം
मराठी
Bahasa Melayu
Mirandés
Nederlands
नेपाल भाषा
日本語
Norsk (bokmål)
Norsk (nynorsk)
Occitan
ਪੰਜਾਬੀ
پنجابی
Papiamentu
Polski
Português
Ripoarisch
Română
Runa Simi
Русиньскый
Русский
Саха тыла
Shqip
Sicilianu
Simple English
Slovenčina
Slovenščina
Српски / Srpski
Srpskohrvatski / Српскохрватски
Suomi
Svenska
Tagalog
தமிழ்
తెలుగు
ไทย
Türkçe
Українська
اردو
Tiếng Việt
Walon
Winaray
ייִדיש
Žemaitėška
中文
This page was last modified on 4 February 2012 at 00:54.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License;
additional terms may apply.
See Terms of use for details.
Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.Contact us
Privacy policy
About Wikipedia
Disclaimers
Mobile view
if ( window.isMSIE55 ) fixalpha();
if ( window.mediaWiki ) {
mw.loader.load(["mediawiki.user", "mediawiki.util", "mediawiki.page.ready", "mediawiki.legacy.wikibits", "mediawiki.legacy.ajax", "mediawiki.legacy.mwsuggest", "ext.gadget.wmfFR2011Style", "ext.vector.collapsibleNav", "ext.vector.collapsibleTabs", "ext.vector.editWarning", "ext.vector.simpleSearch", "ext.UserBuckets", "ext.articleFeedback.startup", "ext.articleFeedbackv5.startup", "ext.markAsHelpful"]);
}
if ( window.mediaWiki ) {
mw.user.options.set({"ccmeonemails":0,"cols":80,"date":"default","diffonly":0,"disablemail":0,"disablesuggest":0,"editfont":"default","editondblclick":0,"editsection":1,"editsectiononrightclick":0,"enotifminoredits":0,"enotifrevealaddr":0,"enotifusertalkpages":1,"enotifwatchlistpages":0,"extendwatchlist":0,"externaldiff":0,"externaleditor":0,"fancysig":0,"forceeditsummary":0,"gender":"unknown","hideminor":0,"hidepatrolled":0,"highlightbroken":1,"imagesize":2,"justify":0,"math":1,"minordefault":0,"newpageshidepatrolled":0,"nocache":0,"noconvertlink":0,"norollbackdiff":0,"numberheadings":0,"previewonfirst":0,"previewontop":1,"quickbar":5,"rcdays":7,"rclimit":50,"rememberpassword":0,"rows":25,"searchlimit":20,"showhiddencats":false,"showjumplinks":1,"shownumberswatching":1,"showtoc":1,"showtoolbar":1,"skin":"vector","stubthreshold":0,"thumbsize":4,"underline":2,"uselivepreview":0,"usenewrc":0,"watchcreations":1,"watchdefault":0,"watchdeletion":0,"watchlistdays":3,"watchlisthideanons":0,
"watchlisthidebots":0,"watchlisthideliu":0,"watchlisthideminor":0,"watchlisthideown":0,"watchlisthidepatrolled":0,"watchmoves":0,"wllimit":250,"flagge Tags:University Of Sussex,Lexicography,Reference Works,Glossary,Thesaurus,Bilingual,Biographical,Electronic,Encyclopedic,Language For Specific Purposes Dictionary,Machine-readable,Maximizing,Medical,Minimizing,Monolingual Learner's,Multi-field,Picture,Reverse,Rhyming,Single-field,Specialized,Sub-field,Visual,Lexigraf,Wordnet,List Of Lexicographers,List Of Online Dictionaries,Lexicology,Idiolect,Lexical Unit,Glyphs,Sememe,Seme,Meronymy,Chereme,Semantic Relations,Holonymy,Hyponymy,Troponymy,Idiom,Synonym,Antonymy,Lexical Semantics,Semantic Net,Function Word,Headword, | |
zote monety |