The Notion of Word

• This chapter is about the notion of "word," word meaning, polysemy, homonymy, and multiword lexemes.

The Notion of Word

• An attempt is made to define what is meant by the term "word" in lexicology.
• Difficulties involved in defining the word are explored, along with the characteristics of words and the ambiguity in the notion of word.
• The term 'word' designates an intermediate structure smaller than a phrase but larger than a sound segment, and can be defined based on representation, thought, or formal criteria.
• The first type of definition relies on writing traditions that separate sequences of letters, but these separations do not always correspond to functional realities.
• The second definition considers the indivisible unit of thought, but faces the problem of delimitation.
• Bloomfield contrasted the word with morphemes (minimal meaningful units) and syntagmes (structures of one or more words) and defined a word as a minimal free form.

Word Defined

• The word, for the purpose of this chapter, consists of one or more morphemes and typically occurs in the structure of phrases and morphemes are the ultimate grammatical constituents of language.
• Lexical words are nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs with independent meanings.
• Grammatical words such as prepositions, articles, and conjunctions contain relatively few members and new members are rarely added to the class.

Characteristics of Words

• Four essential characteristics of a word in English are considered:
• It is an uninterruptible unit.
• May consist of one or more morphemes.
• Occurs typically in the structure of phrases.
• Belongs to a specific word class or part of speech.
• The word carries the basic meaning of a resulting word

Ambiguity in the Notion of Word

• A certain amount of vagueness or ambiguity is accommodated because it is inherent in the nature of language and the word, with the most important sources following Ullmann: generic character of the word, the multiplicity of aspects in every word, the lack of clear-cut boundaries in the non-linguistic world, and the lack of familiarity with the referent of the words.
• A word has abstract reference, applying to a wide range of items but being less specific, and is termed 'generic.'
• Most English words are generic as the words have a number of facets or aspects, with abstract words showing even more marked differences in application.
• In the physical environment, the world divides phenomena with no clear boundaries into discrete units, and 'abstract' terms of ordinary language are less precise and dictionary tries to reduce overlapping uses.
• Lack of familiarity stems from vocabulary being open-ended and knowledge dependant on specialization, which may be a source of ambiguity that causes serious breakdowns in communication .
• The use of language either to express emotions or to arouse them in others refers to emotive overtones, therefore the meaning of any word may be modified adding to both communicative and emotive uses of all utterances.

Word Meaning

• Before the common terms used in the discussion of word meaning are discussed, the aim is to first define 'linguistic sign'.
• The word is a 'linguistic sign' since word meaning focuses on the relationship between acoustic image/signifier and concept/thing meant, however, the fuzzy nature of meaning and the ambiguity inherent in the notion of word cause a difficulty.
• Instead of getting into intricate aspects, the study will be limited to the examination of some common terms that are useful not only in our discussion of the different types of relationship that exist between words, but also in our study of sense relations.
• Denotation, connotation, reference and sense are the common terms, with focus kept on pairs as follows: denotation and reference, denotation and sense, and denotation and connotation.

Denotation & Reference

• Definition: Holds between a lexeme and a whole class of extra-linguistic objects (Lyons).
• Purpose: Clarify the distinction between the two relations by using the concept of "lexeme" which is an abstract linguistic unit with variants.
• Difficulty: Giving concrete examples of denotation since this relation holds between an abstract linguistic unit and a whole class of extra-linguistic objects.

Denotation & Sense

• Denotation holds between a lexeme and a whole class of extra-linguistic objects whereas sense is a relationship between words or expressions in a single language.
• Sense is internal to the language system, with individual lexemes and larger expressions having sense and being a relationship with words, regardless of those words meaning in the external world.

Denotation & Connotation

• Connotation refers to the additional properties of lexemes, e.g. poetic, slang, baby language, biblical, casual, colloquial, formal, humorous, legal, literary, and rhetorical.
• Specialists disagree on the distinction between connotation and denotation, but the study makes the claim synonymy is closely associated with connotation in that synonyms may have same denotation but distinct connotation.

Polysemy

• Definition: Refers to the situation where the same word has two or more different meanings.
• The concept of polysemy, despite its apparent simplicity, involves a certain number of problems, consideration must be given for a number of meanings, transference of meanings, and difficulty in recognizing polysemy.
• It is not easy to say whether two meanings are the same or different, and one meaning cannot always be distinguished from another.

Problems Inherent in the Concept of Polysemy

• Polysemy refers to when a word has multiple meanings; a challenge within is that deciding if meanings are the same or distinct.
• The meaning of a given word tends to vary according to a wide semantic field with overlaps, but a word may have literal + transferred meanings, or be either literal/transferred.

Metaphor

• Metaphor is a type of transference where a word has both a literal and a transferred meaning
• It only applies to individual lexical items e.g. hand/face of clock, foot of bed/mountain, tongue of show and eye of needle etc.
• Is haphazard and irregular within languages as words may be transferred to specific objects.

Homonymy

• Definition: Refers to a situation where two or more words have the same shape but are considered distinct lexemes with unrelated meanings and different etymologies, but there is difficulty establishing "sameness" of shape.
• Terms: two terms are used to refer to "sameness":
• 'homograph' - for when words which are spelt the same
• 'homophone' - for when words are pronounced the same
• Syntactic differences are also possible, but homonyms may also be kept apart.

Homonym Clashes

• These are cases where two homonyms with totally different meanings may both make sense in the same utterance.
• In practice, there is no risk of any confusion because of the word classes a member comes from or the spelling each member has.
• Grammar class contributes to a substantial reduction in the number of 'effective' homonyms in English, even if the class does not automatically rule out all possibilities of confusion.
• English writing is more intelligible as homonymy in the language (spoken and written) is reduced by writing conventions.

Multiword Lexemes

• A lexeme is a 'unit of lexical meaning, regardless of inflectional endings or number of words Crystal, 1995: 118, that can consists of big, boy, break, down, quick.
• Multiword verbs and Idioms are two of the main types of multiword lexeme, but the third is compounds.

Multiword Verbs

• Definition: The main verb and one or two particles that can be analyzed as constituents of a single unit.
• Subsets: 'phrasal verbs', 'prepositional verbs' and 'phrasal-prepositional verbs' are considered.
• Transitivity and the relative position of the direct object will decide the difference between prepositional and phrasal verbs.
• Prepositional verbs = transitive, followed by an object, the object cannot occur between particle and main verb
• Phrasal verbs = can be + transitive (object may occur between verb + particle) or intransitive (has no object), but, the object may occur if after verb
• Phrasal-prepositional verbs = have two particles.

Idioms

• An idiom may be defined as a phrase with two or more words that cannot be predicted from the individual meanings of their morphemes, also being metaphors.

Features of Idioms

• Most are derived from morphemes that are also used non-idiomatically, they can therefore have either a literal or an idiomatic meaning, but there is always ambiguity.
• Idioms also have special syntactic properties as compared to corresponding string or morphemes taken in the literal sense.

Summary

• This chapter provided an answer to the question of what is meant by "word" in lexicology?, examined the notion of word meaning, and discussed the relationships that may be established between words, viz polysemy and homonymy, and revisited the notion of 'lexeme'.