Theoretical words

Words are the typical units of lexicology and lexicography. This seems obvious enough, but there has been a great deal of scholarly discussion about the status of the word in language structure. Some linguists avoid the term altogether giving preference to the morpheme as the smallest and basic grammatical unit. For, while in everyday speech we can live with expressions that have vague and multiple meanings, scientific terms should be unambiguous and, ideally, universally applicable. The word fails on both counts. ‘Word’ is a highly ambiguous term and hard to define in a way valid for all languages. Words are units at the boundary between morphology and syntax serving important functions as carriers of both semantic (Sampson 1979) and syntactic (Di Sciullo and Williams 1987) information and as such are subject to typological variation. In some languages words seem to be more clearly delimited and more stable than in others. The structural make-up of words depends on typological characteristics of languages.