Word

Basic element of language

This article concerns the elementary building block of any spoken or written communication—a word—whose very existence is apparently a source of endless debate among linguists who, unsurprisingly, have yet to agree on a definition that doesn’t involve a footnote the size of a novel. If you were actually looking for the piece of software that makes you sound like a corporate drone, there’s always Microsoft Word . And if you’re after a disambiguation page that probably contains even more obscure references, you can wander over to Word (disambiguation) .

• Part of a series on Linguistics

• Outline • History • Index

General linguistics

She’d probably roll her eyes at the very notion of trying to tidy up the chaos, but here we are, cataloguing the discipline’s favourite pastime of arguing over who gets to name the next obscure sub‑field. It’s the part of the field that pretends to be tidy, even though everyone knows it’s just a dusty attic full of half‑baked theories and dusty footnotes.

• Diachronic

• Lexicography

• Morphology

• Phonology

• Pragmatics

• Semantics

• Syntax

• Syntax–semantics interface

• Typology

Applied linguistics

Applied linguistics is the pragmatic cousin that pretends to solve real‑world problems while secretly hoping no one notices it’s still busy cataloguing every possible way to misuse a comma. It’s the part of the discipline that tries to make language useful, even though most of its “applications” are just clever ways to sell more textbooks.

• Acquisition

• Anthropological

• Applied

• Mathematical

• Computational

• Conversation analysis

• Corpus linguistics

• Discourse analysis

• Determinism

• Distance

• Documentation

• Ethnography of communication

• Ethnomethodology

• Forensic

• History of linguistics

• Interlinguistics

• Neurolinguistics

• Philology

• Philosophy of language

• Phonetics

• Psycholinguistics

• Sociolinguistics

• Text

• Translating and interpreting

• Writing systems

Theoretical frameworks

Theoretical frameworks are the glittery PowerPoints that linguists use to pretend they have a clue about how language works, each one more pretentious than the last, but none of them actually explain why we say “bless you” after a sneeze. They’re the academic equivalent of a fancy PowerPoint template that no one actually reads, but everyone pretends to understand.

• Formalist

• Constituency

• Dependency

• Distributionalism

• Generative

• Glossematics

• Functional

• Cognitive

• Construction grammar

• Functional discourse grammar

• Grammaticalization

• Interactional linguistics

• Prague circle

• Systemic functional

• Usage-based

• Structuralism

Topics

Topics are the little checkboxes that make linguists feel like they’ve actually covered something substantive, even though most of them are just re‑hashes of the same old debates wrapped in fresh jargon. They’re the academic equivalent of ticking boxes on a spreadsheet while pretending you’re doing something profound.

• Autonomy of syntax

• Compositionality

• Conservative and innovative language

• Descriptivism

• Etymology

• Iconicity

• Internet linguistics

• LGBTQ linguistics

• Origin of language

• Orismology

• Orthography

• Philosophy of linguistics

• Prescriptivism

• Second-language acquisition

• Theory of language

• Terminology

See also

See also is the section where Wikipedia politely suggests you might want to look at related nonsense, lest you think you’ve exhausted the subject after reading the entire article. It’s the part that says “Hey, you might also like this other thing that’s basically the same thing but with a different colour.”

• Longest words

• Utterance

• Word (computer architecture)

• Word count , the number of words in a document or passage of text

• Wording

• Etymology

• Writing systems

References

References are the footnotes that make the whole thing look scholarly, even though most of them are just citations to other Wikipedia articles that, surprise surprise, also lack any real citations. They’re the academic equivalent of sprinkling a few dusty citations over a pile of speculation and calling it evidence.

•

• ^ a b Brown, E. K. (2013). The Cambridge dictionary of linguistics . J. E. Miller. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. p. 473. ISBN   978-0-521-76675-3 . OCLC  801681536.

• ^ a b c d • Bussmann, Hadumod (1998). Routledge dictionary of language and linguistics . Gregory Trauth, Kerstin Kazzazi. London: Routledge. p. 1285. ISBN   0-415-02225-8 . OCLC  41252822.

• ^ a b c d e f • Brown, Keith (2005). Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics: V1-14 . Keith Brown (2nd ed.). ISBN   1-322-06910-7 . OCLC  1097103078.

• ^ a b c d e f g h i • Word: a cross-linguistic typology . Robert M. W. Dixon, A. Y. Aikhenvald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. ISBN   0-511-06149-8 . OCLC  57123416. {{cite book }} : CS1 maint: others (link )

• ^ • Harris, Zellig S. (1946). “From morpheme to utterance”. Language . 22 (3): 161–183. doi :10.2307/410205. JSTOR  410205.

• ^ • John R. Taylor, ed. (2015). The Oxford handbook of the word (1st ed.). Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press. ISBN   978-0-19-175669-6 . OCLC  945582776.

• ^ • Chodorow, Martin S.; Byrd, Roy J.; Heidorn, George E. (1985). “Extracting semantic hierarchies from a large on-line dictionary”. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics . Chicago, Illinois: Association for Computational Linguistics: 299–304. doi :10.3115/981210.981247. S2CID  657749.

• ^ • Katamba, Francis (2005). English words: structure, history, usage (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. ISBN   0-415-29892-X . OCLC  54001244.

• ^ • Fleming, Michael; Hardman, Frank; Stevens, David; Williamson, John (2003-09-02). Meeting the Standards in Secondary English (1st ed.). Routledge. doi :10.4324/978-0-203-16555-3. ISBN   978-1-134-56851-2 .

• ^ • Wierzbicka, Anna (1996). Semantics : primes and universals . Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press. ISBN   0-19-870002-4 . OCLC  33012927.

• ^ • “The search for the shared semantic core of all languages.”. Meaning and universal grammar. Volume II: theory and empirical findings . Cliff Goddard, Anna Wierzbicka. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub. Co. 2002. ISBN   1-58811-264-0 . OCLC  752499720. {{cite book }} : CS1 maint: others (link )

• ^ • Adger, David (2003). Core syntax: a minimalist approach . Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN   0-19-924370-0 . OCLC  50768042.

• ^ a b • Fasold, Ralph W.; Connor-Linton, Jeff (2006). An introduction to language and linguistics . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   978-0-521-84768-1 . OCLC  62532880.

• ^ • Bauer, Laurie (1983). English word-formation . Cambridge [Cambridgeshire]. ISBN   0-521-24167-7 . OCLC  8728300. {{cite book }} : CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link )

• ^ • Locke, John (1690). “Chapter II: Of the Signification of Words”. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . Vol. III (1st ed.). London: Thomas Basset.

• ^ • Biletzki, Anar; Matar, Anat (2021). Ludwig Wittgenstein (Winter 2021 ed.). Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.

• ^ • Akmajian, Adrian (2010). Linguistics: an introduction to language and communication (6th ed.). Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN   978-0-262-01375-8 . OCLC  424454992.

• ^ • Beck, David (2013-08-29), Rijkhoff, Jan; van Lier, Eva (eds.), “Unidirectional flexibility and the noun–verb distinction in Lushootseed”, Flexible Word Classes , Oxford University Press, pp. 185–220, doi :10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199668441.003.0007, ISBN   978-0-19-966844-1 , retrieved 2022-08-25

• ^ • De Soto, Clinton B.; Hamilton, Margaret M.; Taylor, Ralph B. (December 1985). “Words, People, and Implicit Personality Theory”. Social Cognition . 3 (4): 369–382. doi :10.1521/soco.1985.3.4.369. ISSN  0278-016X.

• ^ a b • Robins, R. H. (1997). A short history of linguistics (4th ed.). London. ISBN   0-582-24994-5 . OCLC  35178602. {{cite book }} : CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link )

Bibliography

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Words.

•

•

•

Wikiquote has quotations related to Word .

•

•

•

Look up word in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

•

• Barton, David (1994). Literacy: an introduction to the ecology of written language . Oxford, UK: Blackwell. p. 96. ISBN   0-631-19089-9 . OCLC  28722223.

•

• The encyclopedia of language & linguistics . E. K. Brown, Anne Anderson (2nd ed.). Amsterdam: Elsevier. 2006. ISBN   978-0-08-044854-1 . OCLC  771916896. {{cite book }} : CS1 maint: others (link )

•

• Crystal, David (1995). The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language . Cambridge [England]: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   0-521-40179-8 . OCLC  31518847.

•

• Plag, Ingo (2003). Word-formation in English . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN   0-511-07843-9 . OCLC  57545191.

•

• The Oxford English Dictionary . J. A. Simpson, E. S. C. Weiner, Oxford University Press (2nd ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1989. ISBN   0-19-861186-2 . OCLC  17648714. {{cite book }} : CS1 maint: others (link )

•

•

• v • t • e

Lexicology Major terms

• Lexical item

• Lexicon

• Lexis

• Word

Elements

• Chereme

• Glyphs

• Grapheme

• Lemma

• Lexeme

• Morpheme

• Phoneme

• Seme

• Sememe

Semantic relations

• Antonymy

• Hypernymy and hyponymy

• Meronymy and holonymy

• Idiom

• Lexical semantics

• Semantic network

• Synonym

• Troponymy

Functions

• Function word

• Headword

Fields

• Controlled vocabulary

• English lexicology and lexicography

• International scientific vocabulary

• Lexicographic error

• Lexicographic information cost

• Linguistic prescription

• Morphology

• Specialized lexicography

Linguistics portal

•

• • •

Authority control databases International

• GND

National

• United States • France • BnF data • Latvia • Israel

Other

• Yale LUX

Article: