Abstract: The simple idea that we divide an utterance into words using spaces between them, is based on writing. But most languages in history have not been written down and we do not normally pause between words in speech, nevertheless all languages have words. Having a writing system is not a prerequisite to recognizing words, since the ancient Sanskrit grammarians were aware of words and their internal parts long before they had writing. The earliest explicit discussion of the notion ‘word’ is in the work of Aristotle, who distinguished two parts of speech—nouns and verbs. Modern linguists use two criteria for isolating words: the possibility of pause and of interruption. They define parts of speech or lexical categories in terms of their syntactic patterns, not in terms of meaning. The frontier of research on words is the question of how words are stored in the mind and retrieved when we use language.
Publication Year: 2001
Publication Date: 2001-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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