With my classes I used to start with Leonard Bloomfield's definition, "A word is a minimal free form."  A word is the smallest thing that you can say by itself without changing its phonological shape.  So you can pronounce "house" and "houses" but you can't pronounce the plural suffix by itself, at least not without changing how it sounds or having some phonetic training.  In classes where we could explore this definition more deeply, we'd look at the difference between a lexical word and a phonological word.  Lexically, we call "the" a word, but as used in the sentence "The batter hit the ball," you have to either say "the" stressed and with the vowel of "mud" or, with phonetic training, you pronounce it as the unstressed syllable it is, complete with reduced vowel, something most speakers can't do.  So this would mean that the phonological words would be "the batter" and "the ball."  This would get us into the question of what sort of unit "the" is, which would introduce the notion "clitic" a category of form with the property of affixes that it must be attached to something, namely a phrasal category, and the property of a word that it can't be attached to a word root."

Herb

Herbert F. W. Stahlke, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of English
Ball State University
Muncie, IN  47306
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________________________________________
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Peter Adams [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: July 19, 2008 12:23 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Speaking of Elementary Concepts

Can anyone help me out with a good definition or even simply a good way of explaining what a word is?

Peter Adams
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