Talk:Word

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[edit] abso-bloomin'-lutely

I got rid of the part in the article where it gave "absobloominlutely" as an example of a word with an infix. An infix is a grammatical unit like a prefix or suffix except it comes in the middle of a word. There aren't really any of them in the English language. "fan-freakin'-tastic" equals exactly "fantastic" except with an intensifying expletive in it

okay, someone reverted it. Whatever.

[posted by 172.131.206.155 (talk · contribs)] (you can sign posts by typing ~~~~)
Hi, I'm sorry that I reverted your edit — as it was an unmotivated deletion and the very first edit from an anonymous IP, it looked like a test to me, which is why I reverted the deletion and welcomed you on your Talk page. Now that you've explained your deletion, I've reverted myself to allow for discussion here. Hope I didn't scare you! — mark ✎ 18:15, 9 May 2005 (UTC)
It depends of course on one's definition of 'infix', which in your case is a very strict one. However, 'affixation' (just like its children suffixation, prefixation and infixation) is commonly used in a very general way, just to express something being put before, after or inside something else. For example, in reduplication it is common to speak of the 'affixation' of something reduplicated to the base morpheme — this can be a whole word in the case of full reduplication, or (in cases of partial reduplication) only part of a word. I guess one could use 'infixation' in the same, loose way (loose as opposed to the definition of infix you gave above). Thus, I'd take its use in this article as simply descriptive: some word is infixed into another word, i.e. put inside of it. Which in my view makes absobloomin'lutely a fine example. — mark ✎ 18:33, 9 May 2005 (UTC)

See Infix#Linguistics and Expletive infixation. Absobloominlutely is a fine example of infixation (or tmesis, depending on linguists) because the word absolutely is separated.

"fan-freakin'-tastic" equals exactly "fantastic" except with an intensifying expletive in it

They are different because the former has an intensifying expletive, as you have written. Fanfreakintastic is the same as freakin' fantastic. Actually, meaning doesn't matter. We used absobloominlutely as an example of divisibility of a word in some situations, regardless of its meaning. - TAKASUGI Shinji 02:31, 2005 May 10 (UTC)

[edit] Different kinds of words

As I understand it, there are at least two different meanings of word in linguistics:

  • the morphological word, which corresponds to a terminal node (X°) in a syntactic tree, and
  • the phonological word (also called prosodic word), which mostly corresponds to a morphological word, but can include two morphological words in cases of contraction (like don't, won't), and in cases of compounding one morphological word can consist of two phonolgical words (like doghouse). --Angr/tɔk tə mi 6 July 2005 10:32 (UTC)
Yes, but with some reservations; and there is at least another one. First, the first one is heavily theory dependent. Most cognitive linguists would shrug their shoulders and ask 'what is "the syntactic tree"'? To some theorists, the syntactic tree is largely a theoretical construct comparable to a proposition in formal logic. It may or may not have a psychological basis (Lakoff goes so far as to say that Chomskyan syntax is nothing more than a theoretical construct, and a idealized one at that). To others, the psychological basis is quite clear and in that case the notion of word has a more substantial basis in (psycholinguistic) reality (I think Jackendoff might be a good example, but he doesn't use the term 'morphological word' for this.) Furthermore, the terminal node of your garden variety syntactic tree may or may not correspond to what some call a morphological word (it depends on what kind of boundary you want to draw in the syntax/morphology interface).
The second sense you mention ('phonological word') is important in phonology and prosodic theory. Semantics doesn't play a role in this definition. The article touches this under 'phonetic boundaries' (it might be a good idea to mention phonological word there.)
A third sense is word as lexical item (lexeme), as pointed out in the article. 'Word' and 'lexical item' are often used interchangeably. For some, it's important to stress the distinction between the two; if 'word' is indeed the end node of the syntactic tree and 'lexeme' is the item that is stored in memory, the two don't have to be identical.
A lot more could be said but I think the article in its current state does a wonderful job of untangling the different senses of 'word'. — mark ✎ 6 July 2005 21:00 (UTC)
As a somewhat syntax-impaired phonologist, I don't really understand the difference between 'word' as the end node of the tree and 'lexeme' as the item stored in memory. Don't you just take the word you have stored in memory and plug it into the syntactic tree? Can you give an example of a lexeme that isn't an X° or an X° (not counting empty categories, of course) that isn't a lexeme? --Angr/tɔk tə mi 6 July 2005 21:58 (UTC)
It depends on your theory of the lexicon and your definition of lexemes. If you define the lexicon as the inventory of words in memory, there's no problem (but then you have a tautological definition at best). Chomsky, for one, insists (in Aspects) on the non-redundancy of the lexicon — i.e., he wants the lexicon to contain only non-predictable features. This does not necessarily hold for words, however: you won't break up 'runner' into run (verb) + er (nominalizer) in your garden variety syntactic tree. That's an importance difference between words and lexemes in this theory (incidentally, Jackendoff points out that Chomsky likely deviates from psychological reality here, in that there is no reason to think that the brain stores information non-redundantly.)
There is more margin in the definition of lexeme. If the lexeme is to be a psychologically realistic entity, why would one want to confine it to grammatical words? What about idioms like 'hit the road' and 'kick the bucket'? Surely they are stored in memory, and I think those are good examples of lexemes (lexically stored items) that aren't X°'s. Now the other way round. Consider languages with a highly productive morphology like Swahili or Turkish. Grammatical words can have a lot of affixes in those languages (noun class, number, cases, verbal extensions, etc.). Thus, to quote Jackendoff (2002:154) on this issue, "the number of grammatical words [in such languages, MD] is vast, possibly too large to store in long-term memory; on the other hand it is possible to construct most grammatical words online from units that are stored in long-term memory: the independent stems and affixes. These elements are smaller than grammatical words, and cannot be produced in isolation." To give a real example, consider the following Swahili verbs: kulipa 'pay', kununua 'buy', kulipia 'pay for, to' and kununulia 'buy for'. Rather than assuming that these X°'s are all separate lexemes, I would want my theory of the lexicon to account for the semantic regularity observed here: that there is an affix -i- or -li- that introduces an applicative sense to verbs carrying it. This affix is not a grammatical word; the verb as a whole (with the 'applicative extension', as it is called), is. So this applicative verb, I think, is a good example of an X° that is not a lexeme. Hope this helps! — mark ✎ 6 July 2005 22:45 (UTC)
Yes, it does. And I now that I know the difference (I did before, actually, I just thought of it in different terms), I would definitely want my definition of "morphological word" to be X°, not lexeme, as I would not want to say that "kick the bucket" is a word, but I would want to say that kulipia is. --Angr/tɔk tə mi 7 July 2005 06:40 (UTC)

[edit] Definition

The definition stated that a word carries meaning and grammatical employment, what about phonological properties a word is also an association of group of sounds

Yes, please add info on that. As it stands right now, the entire article is only about word boundaries.DanielDemaret 07:58, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
The confusion in the definition of a word comes from the fact that we don't distinguish the means a language uses to denote CONCEPTS, and the units a language uses to create its sentences. If the language is written or spoken does not matter. Kaseluris, Nikos 17:39, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
The definition of word described in the article pertains to the concept of a word only as written (in that it talks about separating words by spaces, for example). It completely disregards the fact that language is verbal in nature. That is to say, it seems to suggest that words can't exist without a written language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.133.74.137 (talk) 06:14, 18 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Polysyntethism

Would French really classify as a polysyntethic language, I find it hard to see how "je ne le sais pas." would classify as more polysynthetic than "Ah dunno." 惑乱 分からん 07:18, 27 November 2006 (UTC

It merely says that it demonstrates elements of a polysynthetic language, not that it is an example. --124.170.35.1 09:16, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Pop Culture

What about the (apparently) popular process of saying "Word!" after a sentence, as an exclamitory enhancer(?)? Alx xlA 05:12, 13 January 2007 (UTC) Wikipedia.org

That would go in another article, I believe. --124.170.35.1 09:17, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Confusing to whom?

"Especially confusing are languages such as Vietnamese, where spaces do not necessarily indicate breaks in words and boundaries must be determined by the context of the piece."

Do literate Vietnamese find it difficult to distinguish a word, or is this a difficulty held by language learners acquiring Vietnamese literacy? If it is the latter, then I doubt Vietnamese should be called "especially confusing." —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.180.55.14 (talk) 19:49, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Confusing to Westerners, of course. It's natural for Vietnamese to delimit monosyllabic morphemes. I have modified the article. - TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 06:05, 4 February 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Powerful Concept?

"All in all, a word is a very powerful concept that permits us to communicate with others and interact with the rest of the world."

Is this really a necessary sentence? It's so wishy washy: "All in all ..." also it's not so much "a word" that allows us to "communicate with others AND interact with the rest of the world" (aren't communicating and interacting the same thing in this context as well?), but language itself, of which "a word" is only a part. And what the hell is a "powerful concept"? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.179.95.145 (talk) 02:35, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] is this really helpful???

seriously.... if you dont know what a word is... you shouldn't really even know what wikipedia is.

[edit] Greetings

Just to let you know, I added a space into the two separate words above and mentioned; 'abovementioned'. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 172.142.10.142 (talk) 01:28, 19 February 2008 (UTC)