Throughout the preceding chapter, we approached the description of processes involved in word formation as if the unit called the ‘word’ was always a regular and easily identifiable form, even when it is a form such as bambification that we may never have seen before. This doesn't seem unreasonable when we look at a text of written English, since the ‘words’ in the text are, quite obviously, those sets of things marked in black with the bigger spaces separating them. Unfortunately, there are a number of problems with using this observation as the basis of an attempt to describe language in general, and individual linguistic forms in particular.

Morphology

In many languages, what appear to be single forms actually turn out to contain a large number of ‘word-like’ elements. For example, in Swahili (spoken throughout East Africa), the form nitakupenda conveys what, in English, would have to be represented as something like I will love you. Now, is the Swahili form a single word? If it is a ‘word’, then it seems to consist of a number of elements which, in English, turn up as separate ‘words’.