What is a word?

Lin 211 • Section 2, Part 2

Kevin B McGowan
kbmcgowan@uky.edu

2026-09-16

Due today: Pullum Chapter 3

Thanks to Stella!

  • Enormous thanks to Stella for running our first SPOTLIGHT lecture on “What is linguistics research?”
    • Research = finding answers to questions
    • Good research questions are…
      • Based on previous research
      • Practical
      • Specific
    • Why do we care?
    • Be curious!

Previously in Linguistics 211

  • Languages are “structured systems for making articulated thoughts fully explicit”
  • Focus on the human capacity for language
  • There are ~7,000 human languages
  • The study of language change over time is historical linguistics
  • All languages change!
  • Language families

What is a word?

What is language made of?

  • Next we’ll look at the bits and pieces that make up language
  • Our first question today is: what is a word?
    • We all agree that languages have words
    • At 20, Americans know about 42,000 words on average (Brysbaert et al. 2016)
  • But how do we define what ‘a word’ is?
  • Does that seem like a silly question?

What is a word?

  • “The smallest separate piece of a language that all by itself will have a meaning.”
red class work
  • But what about…
red -ness class -es work -ing
red -den class -y work -aholic
redneck classroom workhorse

Words

  • How about: the smallest meaningful unit that can occur by itself?
  • But the following words almost never occur alone:
the a an
of with will
  • Do they have meaning?

Don’t confuse language with writing

  • “A word is the sequence of letters between two blanks.”
  • But language != writing
  • And there are no pauses between spoken words!
  • What about languages with no writing systems?
  • Or writing systems with no spacing?

What is a word? (cont.)

Mandarin German
Almost entirely one syllable: Many syllables per word
能 néng Nahrungsmittelunverträglichkeit
‘be able’ ‘food intolerance’
周 zhou Sprachwissenschaftler
‘week’ linguist

Attendance Question 9-16 (lecture day 7)

Our attendance question for today is on canvas and the access code is on the whiteboard.

To know a word

  • Knowing a word requires (at least) four kinds of knowledge:

    • Phonetic / phonological knowledge
    • Syntactic knowledge
    • Morphological knowledge
    • Semantic knowledge

What is phonetics?

  • Phonetics is the study of the sounds in a language
    • Articulatory phonetics focuses on the human vocal apparatus and describes sounds in terms of their articulation in the vocal tract
    • Acoustic phonetics uses the tools of physics to study the nature of sound waves produced in human language
    • Speech perception uses the tools of psychology & psychoacoustics to study the nature of listeners’ experience of language

What is phonology?

  • Phonology is the study of the systems of contrastive relationships among the speech sounds of different languages
    • Why do some languages have such different sets of sounds?
    • Includes sound categories but also phonotactics, syllables, stress, intonation, etc.

What is syntax?

  • Syntax is the study of how words can be combined to form larger units of meaning in different languages
    • It’s all about how words group together (constituency), hierarchical structure, and constraints on how those can happen
    • It is easy to see that some words have some things in common; they share certain characteristics and behave similarly.
  • But in order to talk about structure, we need to know a little about…

Syntactic information

  • Syntactic Categories are categories of words based on similar functions, meanings, and forms
    • AKA lexical categories , word classes , parts of language/speech
    • Major classes: Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs
    • Minor classes: Pronouns, Determiners, Prepositions, Auxiliary verbs, Conjunctions

Morphology

  • To explore morphological knowledge, we need the subfield of morphology , which is the study of word formation
  • In morphology, we study a word’s component parts and internal structures
    • How many parts are there in a word?
    • For example, how many parts are in the word friendliness ?
    • These parts are called morphemes – the smallest meaningful unit in language (that is, the lowest level a word may be broken down into and still express some meaning)

Morphological Rules

  • The operations that create and modify those parts and internal structures are called morphological rules
  • Remember, grammar = rules, and all languages have rules!
  • Example rule in English:
    • How do we make a noun into an adjective?
      • Smell + -y = smelly
      • Cat + -like = catlike
      • Man + -ly = manly
  • Morphological rules can create new words in productive, predictable ways!

Morphological information

What is semantics?

  • Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning

    • Deals with the systematic ways in whcih languages structure meaning, especially in words and sentences

    • There are three main types of meaning:

      • Denotational meaning: (aka ‘linguistic meaning’) The literal thing, action, idea, syntactic information that the word points to in our minds
      • Affective meaning: emotional connotation attached to words and utterances
      • Social meaning: How we identify certain social characteristics of speakers and sitations (e.g. y’all, pop/soda/coke, whom)

What’s next?

  • Come to lecture Monday for “How do words get their meaning?”

  • Get started on Observation Notes #2 (due February 14)!

  • Quiz 3 Friday!

References

Brysbaert, Marc, Michaël Stevens, Paweł Mandera, and Emmanuel Keuleers. 2016. “How Many Words Do We Know? Practical Estimates of Vocabulary Size Dependent on Word Definition, the Degree of Language Input and the Participant’s Age.” Frontiers in Psychology 7 (July). https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01116.