Some words on Word

Abstract

In many disciplines, the notion of a word is of central importance. For instance, morphology studies le mot comme tel, pris isol´ement (Mel’ˇcuk, 1993 [74]). In the philosophy of language the word was often considered to be the primary bearer of meaning. Lexicography has as its fundamental role to catalogue the words of a language. Thus, there has been a lot of work on words and on the nature of words. Examples are ‘Word and Object’ (Quine, 1960), ‘Het Woord’ (Reichling, 1989), and ‘on the Definition of Word’ (di Sciullo, 1988). All these works, however, focus primarily on the semantic content of words. The metaphysical questions about the nature of words have received relatively little attention. Probably the most thorough analysis of the notion is to be found in (Lyons, 1995), who makes a categorisation of different notion of ‘word’. A refreshing new look at the metaphysics of words can be found in (Kaplan, 1990). In this article, we will attempt an analysis of the notion of a ‘word’ which does justice both to the demands of philosophy and of linguistics. We do not aim to be exhaustive here. Such an endeavour would merit a book or a series of books. We rather aim at providing something like a map of the various issues. Given the delicate nature of the subject, it should hardly be surprising that one needs a rich ontology to account for all the subtle problems. This article will try to provide as detailed an ontology as possible given its limited length, and to provide a proper nomenclature for the many different aspects of words. Where possible, we will follow established terminology, starting from the definitions given by Lyons (1995). Throughout this article, we will try to use a coherent notation for the different entities that will be introduced: strings or orthographic words will be put in courier, /utterances/ or /phonological words/ in IPA between slashes, wordforms in sans-serif, lexemes in bold-face and words-qua-basicprimitive- things will be underlined. Only emphasised and ‘quoted’ styles will be used in their normal, sloppy way