This volume examines the concept of 'word' in its many guises and across many languages. 'Word' is a cornerstone for the understanding of any language: it is a pronounceable phonological unit; it has a meaning and a morphological structure and syntactic function; and it exists as a dictionary entry and an orthographic item. Speakers also understand 'word' as a psychological reality: they can talk about the meaning of a word and its suitability in certain social contexts. However, the relationship between the phonological word and grammatical word can be more complex, in that a phonological word can consist of more than one grammatical word, or vice versa. Following an introduction outlining the parameters of variation for phonological word and grammatical word, the chapters in this volume explore how the concept of 'word' can be applied to languages of diverse typological make-up, from the highly synthetic to highly analytic. The data are drawn from languages of Australia and the Pacific (Fijian, Yalaku, Yidiñ), the Americas (Chamacoco, Murui, Jarawara), Asia (Hmong, Japanese, Lao), and Africa (Makary Kotoko), with a final chapter that investigates the properties of 'word' from a cross-linguistic perspective. The volume advances our understanding of what constitutes a word, and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of typology, linguistic anthropology, phonology, and grammar.

Geert Booij's popular textbook has been revised and updated. It covers every aspect of morphological theory and the analysis of words, examines the relation between morphology and other modules of grammar, and is the only introductory text to explore the role of morphology in language processing and change.

This volume examines the concept of 'word' as a phonological unit and as an item with both meaning and grammatical function. The chapters explore how this concept can be applied to a range of typologically diverse languages, from Lao and Hmong in Southeast Asia to Yidiñ in northern Australia and Murui in the Amazonian jungle.

How do we find the right word for the job? Where does that word come from? Why do we spell it like that? And how do we know what it means? Words are all around us - we use them every day to communicate our joys, fears, hopes, opinions, wishes and demands - but we don't often think about them too deeply. In this highly accessible introduction to English words, the reader will discover what the study of words can tell them about the extraordinary richness and complexity of our daily vocabulary and about the nature of language in general. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, the book covers a wide range of topics, including the structure of words, the meaning of words, how their spelling relates to pronunciation, how new words are manufactured or imported from other languages, and how the meaning of words changes with the passage of time. It also investigates how the mind deals with words by highlighting the amazing intellectual feat performed routinely when the right word is retrieved from the mental dictionary. This revised and expanded second edition brings the study of words right up to date with coverage of text messaging and email and includes new material on psycholinguistics and word meaning. With lively examples from a range of sources - encompassing poetry, jokes, journalism, advertising and clichés - and including practical exercises and a fully comprehensive glossary, English Words is an entertaining introduction to the study of words and will be of interest to anyone who uses them.

The present volume consists of nine articles dealing with the role of the constituent 'phonological word' (or 'prosodic word') in various typologically diverse languages. These languages and their respective families subsume Indo-European (Dutch, German, English, European Portuguese), Bantu (SiSwati, KiNande), Algonquian (Cree), Siouan (Dakota), and Salishan (Lushootseed). One contribution examines the phonological word in a sign language. The theoretical issues dealt with in the book include: evidence for the phonological word (e.g. rules, phonotactics, syllabification, stress patterns), the connection between morphosyntactic and prosodic structure (e.g. alignment phenomena in Optimality Theory), and the relationship between the phonological word and other prosodic constituents (e.g. the prosodic representation of clitics).The volume will be of interest to all linguists and advanced students of linguistics working on Prosodic Phonology, phonology–morphology and phonology–syntax interface and Optimality Theory.

English Words aims to arouse curiosity about English words and about the nature of language in general, especially among introductory students who do not intend to specialize in linguistics.

Geert Booij's popular textbook on the structure of words has been revised and updated in a third edition. The book covers every aspect of morphological theory and the analysis of words. It is the only introductory text to explore the role of morphology in language processing and language change, and also deals with the relation between morphology and other modules of grammar. The book includes a full glossary and exercises with answers. - revised and updated - with a glossary of terms - exercises and suggestions for further reading - the clearest and most readable text on the market

Seminar paper from the year 2015 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 14 Punkte, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, language: English, abstract: The work at hand deals with one of the most important issues in lexicology, namely the question how the notion of word can be properly described and how it can be demarcated from other notions like phrase or morpheme, which are bigger and smaller units than the word respectively. For this purpose, various ways to look at and define the notion of word are examined. As a conclusion, a viable definition of the notion of word (for linguistic purposes) will be provided. The first chapter offers some general remarks concerning the importance of the word on the one hand, and the difficulties involved in finding a proper definition on the other hand. In the second chapter, the word will be examined from various points of view. Thus, words in writing (orthographic words), words in speech (phonological words), words as abstracts units of thought and, finally, grammatical words, will be dealt with. Moreover, important formal features of words will be looked at.

This volume takes a variety of approaches to the question 'what is a word?', with particular emphasis on where in the grammar wordhood is determined. Chapters in the book all start from the assumption that structures at, above, and below the 'word' are built in the same derivational system: there is no lexicalist grammatical subsystem dedicated to word-building. This type of framework foregrounds the difficulty in defining wordhood. Questions such as whether there are restrictions on the size of structures that distinguish words from phrases, or whether there are combinatory operations that are specific to one or the other, are central to the debate. In this respect, chapters in the volume do not all agree. Some propose wordhood to be limited to entities defined by syntactic heads, while others propose that phrasal structure can be found within words. Some propose that head-movement and adjunction (and Morphological Merger, as its mirror image) are the manner in which words are built, while others propose that phrasal movements are crucial to determining the order of morphemes word-internally. All chapters point to the conclusion that the phonological domains that we call words are read off of the morphosyntactic structure in particular ways. It is the study of this interface, between the syntactic and phonological modules of Universal Grammar, that underpins the discussion in this volume.

While linguistic theory is in continual flux as progress is made in our ability to understand the structure and function of language, one constant has always been the central role of the word. On looking into words is a wide-ranging volume spanning current research into word-based morphology, morphosyntax, the phonology-morphology interface, and related areas of theoretical and empirical linguistics. The 26 papers that constitute this volume extend morphological and grammatical theory to signed as well as spoken language, to diachronic as well as synchronic evidence, and to birdsong as well as human language.