THE WORD

The term word denotes the basic unit of a given language resulting from the association of a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment.

Many scholars have attempted to define a word as a linguistic phenomena. Yet as for the theoretical definition of the word no satisfactory definition has yet been formulated. Many linguists even substitute the term word by such notions as lexime (token) (V.V. Vinogradov), lexico-semantic variant (A.I. Smirnitskey), or even word-form, vocabular..

One of the first attempts to define a word was made by I.A.Boduen-de-Kurtene who said that a word can be identified differently as it possesses different elements that demand singling out different units. They might not coincide with the word in the above mentioned traditional understanding.

We can single out some criteria of a word bearing in mind that not any of them has a universal character.

The first feature we should pay attention to is the graphical representation of a word as words in writing are separated by blanks.

The second criterion of a word is its phonetics or the sound representation of a word. It should be mentioned that there are several features of this type such as word-stress and pausing.

According to Charles Hochett a word is a segment of a sentence bounded by successive points at which pausing is possible, e.g., the sentence John treats his sister very nicely permits the breathing into 7 successive items - words - each having its own intonation. But even Ch. Hochett himself realises one may not pause so often; his older and very nicely might be kept as a single micro-segment, so the unreliability of such a definition is clearly seen.

From the morphological point of view a word is characterized by the so called criterion of integral structure (цельнооформленности), i.e., grammar markers shape the whole word but not its parts, e.g., greenhouse - greenhouses (plural form). But if we look at the English riddle The son of Pharaoh's daughter was the daughter of Pharaoh's son we can misinterpret it (сын дочери фараона был дочерью сына фараона). The clue here is the peculiar feature of the English possessive 's can mark not a separate word only but a whole phrase as well so the riddle should be interpreted as (The son of Pharaoh) 's daughter was the daughter of Pharaoh's son (Сына-фараона-дочь была дочерью сына фараона). The second variant is: The son of Pharaoh's daughter was (the daughter of Pharaoh) 's son (Сын дочери фараона был дочери-фараона-сыном). But there is no doubt that the phrase the daughter of Pharaoh is a single word.

Another attempt to define a word was made by Leonard Bloomfield whose approach was fully syntactical. He said that a word is a minimum free form (the difference between free and bound forms lies in the fact that bound forms can’t be used in isolation whereas free forms can function as separate utterances, can occur as sentences). But such a definition is not reliable in the case of English articles. So in defining a word the syntactical criterion of minimal free forms may be accepted only as an additional one.

The semantic approach is found in Stephen Ullmann’s explanation. According to him, speech, if analysed from the semantic point of view will form a number of meaningful units called words. Very similar are the views of the present-day English scholars (e.g., M. McCarthy, 1995) who thinks of words as freestanding items of the language that have meaning. If we take the English word eating, we can see that it is freestanding in itself, and within it has another potentially freestanding element eat, independently meaningful from the second element -ing, which is meaningful but bound, that is, not freestanding. As the two meaningful parts of eating are called morphemes, we can say that a word must consist of at least one potentially freestanding morpheme. Some words may consist of several morphemes; deformed consists of three - de-form-ed - only form is a word in its own right. However, wastepaper-basket consists of three morphemes which at the same time are capable of being three freestanding words in other contexts.

The weak point of all the above mentioned definitions is that they do not establish the relationship between language and thought.

The efforts of many scholars such as V.V. Vinogradov, A.I. Smirnitskey, O.S. Ahmanova, A.A.Ufimtseva resulted in the clear presentation of a word as a basic unit of the language which is the form of the existence of a notion and which is used with the purpose of communication. A word is a unity of the form and the context. It has two structures: the external - its sound form and morphological structure, and the internal one - its meaning. There is no direct relationship between the two, though they are related to each other. This relationship is termed the inner form of the word (the term introduced by A.A. Potebnya) or motivation (мотивировка). Motivation is the awareness of the particular language speaker of the word (the word combination) meaning validity grounded by the constituent morphemes meanings or by the primary meaning of the same word. In other words, motivation is an image or an idea taken as the basis for the process of nomination and determining a certain pattern of the word concept formation.

There are three types of motivation:

The first presupposes a certain similarity between the sounds which make up a word and those referred to by the sense. E.g., in all these words hiss, bang, giggle, splash, roar, snore we see the direct connection between the sound form and the meaning of the word, and therefore it is the example of phonological motivation.

Many words are motivated by their morphological structure (morphological motivation). E.g., the derived word rethink motivated for its morphological structure suggests the idea of thinking again. So the motivation stops at word level.

Semantic motivation is based on the criterion of direct and figurative meanings, e.g., mouth denotes a part of a human face and at the same time it means any opening or outlet: the mouth of a river or a cave. In its direct meaning the word mouth is not motivated, in its figurative meaning it is a metaphor. The words are non-motivated when the connection between the phonological and morphological structure of the word and its meaning is conventional.

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