The Classification of Words

MORPHOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
§ 6. There exist many definitions of the. term word and none of them is generally accepted. But in the majority of cases pedple actually experience no difficulty in separating one word from another in their native tongue. ¹
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; сотр. 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. ² This is reflected in -writing where the graphic form of almost- every word is separated by intervals from its neigh­bours. ³
Some difficulty is caused by different applications of the term word. ⁴ Linguists often apply it to a whole group like
¹ E. Sapir writes (Language. London, 1922, p. 34) that even "the
naive Indian, quite unaccustomed to the concept of the written word,
has nevertheless no serious difficulty in dictating a text to a linguistic
student word by word ... he can readily isolate the words as such, repeat­
ing them as units."
² The terms and examples have been taken from Pike K. Language
in Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behavior, 1960, p. 4.
³ A. Martinet. A Functional View of Language. Oxford, 1962.
"As a matter of fact, inseparability is one of the most useful criteria for
distinguishing what is formally one word from what is a succession of
different words. In any case it is the one that generations of scribes have
adopted, as a rule, throughout the centuries of alphabetic writing practice,
when they have endeavoured to divide the written continuum of each
language into those segments which constitute our graphic 'words'."
* See Морфологическая структура слова в языках различных типов. АН СССР, М,—Л., 1963, р. 223.
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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.)