KEY TOPICS

• Parts of words

• Analysing morphology

• Derivation and inflection

• Non-linear morphology

• Clitics

What is a word?

In this chapter we will look at the parts that words are made from: morphemes. We will learn to recognize them and will introduce some terms to describe them. In this section we discuss what we mean by a word, and how we might find words.

As members of a literate language community, we might think that defining a word is easy, but when we speak, of course, we do not mark word breaks. In a language that we do not know, we need a strategy for locating the boundaries between words.

In general terms, when we talk about a word we mean a separate, independent phonological unit. However, when we talk we run our words together and, despite what written conventions suggest, there usually are not audible pauses between our words. So how can we determine where words begin and end?

One feature of words is that they can be said on their own, in isolation. A speaker of English would be happy to pronounce the sequence /hapi/ happy on its own and call it a word, but would almost certainly not feel the same about /v/ ve or /ə/ (as in could've or coulda).

Secondly, when we do pause during natural speech, that pause always occurs between words, not in the middle of phonological words, as illustrated in (1).