Lecture 3 - Words

and Lexemes
Mgr. Martin Mačura
 What is a word?
► The concept of a word is central to lexicology.
► Words are usually used to designate something smaller than a whole
phrase but larger than a single sound segment.
► Do all languages have words? Our intuitions suggest that a word
is a unit which is much smaller than a sentence, and that a sentence
typically consists of a sequence of words. But this account does not
hold straightforwardly for all languages. In some languages, it can be
difficult to draw a distinction between sentences and words. Such
languages are known as polysynthetic languages. Here is a typical
sentence from Yup’ik, an Eskimo language of Alaska:
► Kaipiallrulliniuk. ‘The two of them were apparently really hungry.’
 1. Orthographic definition
► A word is a sequence of letters bound by a space or punctuation
mark. Used with word count methods. Relies on writing traditions,
sequence of letters or characters separated by spaces or punctuation marks.
► Has drawbacks:
► Postbox or post box. Orthography relates only to written form of language,
cannot be applied to spoken form, we don’t speak with pauses.
► Dictionary listing drawback: should open, opens, opened be listed as a
single word? Orthographic definition cares only about the form, not about
meaning or grammatical function.
► Separations do not always correspond to functional realities. A new
waste paper basket. The first two spaces are not the same as the last two.
The last two create a semantic unit, the first two do not.
► Of course, this freedom to choose where to put white spaces is far from
absolute. In most cases, the rules of our orthography dictate where the
white spaces should go, and failure to conform produces manifest illiteracy.
 2. Phonological definition
► A phonological word is a piece of speech which behaves as a
unit of pronunciation according to phonological criteria which vary
from language to language. In English, the most useful criterion is this
one: a phonological word contains only one main stress.
► The rest of the books’ll have to go here.
► There are five main stresses here, falling on the words rest, books,
have, go and here. This sentence therefore contains five phonological
words. One obvious way of breaking up the utterance into
phonological words is as follows:
► [the rest] [of the books’ll] [have to] [go] [here]
► You can see that not all of these units correspond to units that
we might want to recognize for other purposes: for example, of the
books’ll is certainly not a unit of grammatical structure, but we
nevertheless pronounce it as a single phonological word.
 3. ‘No more than one stressed
syllable’ definition
► pen, flag, rag, ambiguous are words.
► Has drawbacks:
► some words normally do not receive stress
(and)
► some two-element compounds (bus driver)
do not fall in because both of them receive
stress – level stress.
 4. ‘Minimum meaningful unit’
definition
► -We already care about meaning behind words. This is a
huge step forward because we already deal with and
differentiate meanings.
► Has drawbacks:
► Single units of meaning expressed with e.g. two
words (plane crash).
► Boundary between compounds (police investigation) and
free collocations (a good car) is unclear. Is it a specific
investigation performed by the police (one lexeme) or is it
just a collocation of two words having two separate
meanings (two lexemes)?
► Meaning is hardly conveyed with grammar words
(prepositions, conjunctions, auxiliary verbs etc.)
 5. ‘Minimum free form’
definition
► a word can stand by itself on its own as a reply to a
question, as a statement or exclamation.
 Question or statement test. Taxi! If ever.
► Writing and thought are unimportant, purely formal criteria
are considered. Bloomfield contrasted the word to other
units of analysis, the morpheme (minimum meaningful
unit), syntagm (more words together). A word is a
minimum free form. It can occur in isolation and still
has meaning but cannot be analyzed into elements
which could also occur alone and have meaning.
► Has drawbacks: some words just do not fall in (my, the, a,
of, and.)
6. 'Unit of thought' definition
► Indivisible unit of thought is the criterion,
delimiting it is a bit difficult:
► [1] the word used in writing represents a thought
unit or a psychological unit. Table, house,
courage, faith.
► [2] the word has one block but includes two
units of thought: rethink, spoonful.
► [3] the psychological unit exceeds the limit of
the graphological unit and spreads over several
words. The word is only an element in a more
complex unit: all of a sudden, as a matter of
fact, as usual.
 Word defined
► It is easy to ask what a word is, native speakers
may say they are listed in dictionaries, separated
in writing and by pauses... but it is difficult to
make a definition that would apply to all types
of words in English.
► A working definition: an uninterruptible unit of
structure which consists of one or more
morphemes and typically occurs in structure
of phrases.
Typical characteristics of words
► 1. A word is uninterruptible
► When elements are added to modify its
meaning, they are never added into the
word, they respect its internal stability.
People assume the internal stability of
words.
► A tip to poets: play with internal stability of
words. E.g. Infixes sensebloodytivity
Typical characteristics of words
► 2. A word consists of one or more
morphemes
► When it consists of one morpheme only, it
cannot be broken down to lower meaningful
units (tree, man, sun). These words are called
simple. They are 'minimum free'.
► When it consists of more than one morpheme, it
is either complex (one free form and one bound
form, quick-er, sing-ing) or compound (two or
more free forms, birth-day, black-bird)
► Combinations are possible: gentle-man-ly.
Typical characteristics of words
► 3.A word typically occurs in a
structure of phrases. morphemes ->
words -> phrases ->clauses -> sentences.
 Lexeme
► It is reasonably difficult to define a word. That’s why
another notion had to be introduced to eliminate the
drawbacks with word definitions - a lexeme.
► A lexical item is an abstract unit, and it must be
represented in speech or writing by one of the possibly
several forms it can assume for grammatical purposes.
For example, if we want to mention canine animals, we
must use either the singular form [dog] or the plural form
[dogs]. But these two grammatical forms both represent
the same single abstract unit, the same lexical item. We
can conveniently represent that lexical item as DOG. Then
dog and dogs are the two possible forms of the lexical item
DOG.
 Lexeme
►A lexeme is an abstract semantic unit that
encompasses/covers all the above problems:
► (1) grammatical variants and word forms
paradigms (open, opens). We deal here with units
of meaning, basic contrasting units of meaning in
language. Dictionary lists lexemes, not words.
► (2) multielement words (jack of all trades),
phrasals (get off).
► (3) polysemy issues (line in drawing, fishing,
railway), polysemantic words appear as separate
lexemes.
 Grammar words and lexical
words
► Grammar words form a small and defined group (pronouns, articles,
aux. verbs, prepositions, conjunctions), they are a close system.
Their meaning is always dependent; we cannot form sets and think
that these sets will suggest any identifiable meaning.
► Lexical words/content words/full words are nouns, adjectives,
verbs, adverbs and form an indefinite group. They carry the meaning
and are syntactically geared by grammar words. Unlimited
number of lexical words (closed class vs. open class).
► One to one match between a grammar word and its lexeme. BY =
by
► Multimatch between word forms of lexical words and their lexemes.
OPEN = open, opens...
► The dividing line between lexical and grammatical words is not as
clear as it may seem. E.g. prepositions are considered to be
grammar words, but a change of a preposition in a sentence The
book is on the table has a huge effect on meaning.