Word - Wikipedia. In linguistics, a word is the smallest element that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning). This contrasts deeply with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. A word may consist of a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock, red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks, redness, quickly, running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word (in the words just mentioned, these are - s, - ness, - ly, - ing, un- , - ed). A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes (rock- s, red- ness, quick- ly, run- ning, un- expect- ed), or more than one root in a compound (black- board, rat- race). Words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases (a red rock), clauses (I threw a rock), and sentences (He threw a rock too, but he missed). The term word may refer to a spoken word or to a written word, or sometimes to the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, and written words of symbols called graphemes, such as the letters of the English alphabet. Definitions. Dictionaries categorize a language's lexicon (i. These can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a . The most appropriate means of measuring the length of a word is by counting its syllables or morphemes. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves. However, some written words are not minimal free forms as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of). According to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations. 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. Download Microsoft Word and enjoy it on your iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Of one's word, given to or noted for keeping one's promises: I am a man of my word. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words, or fail to separate two or more closely linked words (e. 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 . 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). Nevertheless, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions. Orthographic boundaries: See below. Orthography. 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. For example, ice cream, air raid shelter and get up each are generally considered to consist of more than one word (as each of the components are free forms, with the possible exception of get). Not all languages delimit words expressly. Mandarin Chinese is a very analytic language (with few inflectional affixes), making it unnecessary to delimit words orthographically. However, there are a great number of multiple- morpheme compounds in Mandarin, as well as a variety of bound morphemes that make it difficult to clearly determine what constitutes a word. Sometimes, languages which are extremely close grammatically will consider the same order of words in different ways. For example, reflexive verbs in the French infinitive are separate from their respective particle, e. This is a fairly soft rule, because content words can also be written in hiragana for effect (though if done extensively spaces are typically added to maintain legibility). Vietnamese orthography, although using the Latin alphabet, delimits monosyllabic morphemes rather than words. In character encoding, word segmentation depends on which characters are defined as word dividers. Morphology. 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. Thus, the Proto- Indo- European *wr. 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. Welcome to WORDWORLD, a colorful, word-rich place where a wacky troupe of WordFriends. WordWorld - Build A Word Song! Word World Full Episodes - Pig's Present. Other merriam-webster dictionaries. Define of (one's) word. A sound or a combination of sounds, or its. LEARNER'S QUIZZES Vocabulary Quiz. Test Your Knowledge » LEARNER'S WORD OF THE DAY sashay : to walk in a slow and confident way that makes people notice you. John Locke wrote that the use of words . This perhaps could have led to John's introduction in chapter of a description in the Greek translation as . The basic bipartite division possible for virtually every natural language is that of nouns vs. The Oxford Handbook of the Word. Association for Computational Linguistics, 1. Katamba 1. 1^Fleming 7. Wierzbicka 1. 99. Goddard 2. 00. 2^Adger (2. Retrieved 1. 3 March 2. Retrieved 1. 3 March 2. Core Syntax: A Minimalist Approach. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Literacy: An Introduction to the Ecology of Written Language. English Word- formation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Crystal, David (1. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language (1 ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fleming, Michael; et al. Meeting the Standards in Secondary English: A Guide to the ITT NC. Goddard, Cliff (2. In Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka. Meaning and Universal Grammar: Theory and Empirical Findings(PDF). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Katamba, Francis (2. English Words: Structure, History, Usage. Word- formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Oxford English Dictionary (2 ed.). Wierzbicka, Anna (1. Semantics: Primes and Universals. Oxford University Press.
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