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- Title
What's in a word?
- Authors
Ramat, Paolo
- Abstract
A good definition of 'what is a word' is preliminary to every word-formation theory, and also every analysis of compounds. The article contains a short overview of the search for a "good", viable definition of word from Ferdinand de Saussure to André Martinet and Edward Sapir. Finally, also the Construction Grammar approach is dealt with. Three possible criteria for a prototypical definition are suggested: autonomy, mobility, and cohesion. Not all criteria are applicable to the same degree to lexemes and/or constructions, and some counterexamples are discussed. Every definition based on the notion of 'prototype' entails gradualness of the concerned items. Accordingly, in linguistics, gradualness has important consequences for every word-formation theory. For instance, the absence of water-proof word classes enables speakers to consider suffixes as compound second members and vice versa compound second members as word suffixes. Via discussion of appropriate examples it is shown that words appear as disposed along a continuum of higher or lower 'wordiness'. This situation entails that, typologically speaking, there are two morphosyntactic poles without clear-cut boundaries among the intermediate types. One pole is represented by an ideal totally isolating language where the morpheme-per-word ratio is 1:1, which means that each word contains a single morpheme. At the other end of the continuum we find the fusional, agglutinative and polysynthetic types: all of them make use of concatenative strategies, more or less extensive and extendable. On the basis of the comparison of the different linguistic types, we may define the prototypical word as a string of sounds that does not have any necessary relation to its semantic content and does not contain any morphological or syntactic relational sign. Consequently, opaqueness and symbolism are characteristic of the prototypical word, whereas iconism and transparency are characteristic of the (poly)synthetic languages and their concatenative strategy.
- Subjects
WORD formation (Grammar); COMPOUND words; CONSTRUCTION grammar; DEFINITIONS; PROTOTYPE (Linguistics); MORPHOSYNTAX
- Publication
SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 2016, Vol 13, Issue 2, p106
- ISSN
1336-782X
- Publication type
Article