Words as meaningful building-blocks of language

We think of words as the basic units of language. When a baby begins to speak, the way the excited mother reports what has happened is: ‘Sally (or Tommy) has said her (or his) first word!’ We would be surprised at a mother who described little Tommy’s or Sally’s first utterance as a sentence. Sentences come later, we are inclined to feel, when words are strung together meaningfully. That is not to say that a sentence must always consist of more than one word. One-word commands such as ‘Go!’ or ‘Sit!’, although they crop up relatively seldom in everyday conversation or reading, are not in any way odd or un-English. Nevertheless, learning to talk in early childhood seems to be a matter of putting words together, not of taking sentences apart.

There is a clear sense, then, in which words seem to be the building-blocks of language. Even as adults, there are quite a few circumstances in which we use single words outside the context of any actual or reconstructable sentence. Here are some examples:

• warning shouts, such as ‘Fire!’

• conventional commands, such as ‘Lights!’, Camera!’, ‘Action!’

• items on shopping lists, such as ‘carrots’, ‘cheese’, ‘eggs’.

It is clear also that words on their own, outside sentences, can be sorted and classified in various ways. A comprehensive classification of English words according to meaning is a thesaurus, such as Roget’s Thesaurus. But the kind of conventional classification that we are likely to refer to most often is a dictionary, in which words are listed according to their spelling in alphabetical order.

Given that English spelling is so erratic, a common reason for looking up a word in an English dictionary is to check how to spell it. But another very common reason is to check what it means. In fact, that is what a dictionary entry basically consists of: an association of a word, alphabetically listed, with a definition of what it means, and perhaps also some information about grammar (the word class or part of speech that the word belongs to) and its pronunciation. Here, for example, is a specimen dictionary entry for the word month, based on the entry given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (6th edition):

month noun. Any of twelve portions into which the year is divided.

It seems, then, that a word is not just a building-block of sentences: it is a building-block with a meaning that is unpredictable, or at least sufficiently unpredictable that learners of English, and even sometimes native speakers, may need to consult a dictionary in order to discover it.

We may be tempted to think that this constitutes everything that needs to be said about words: they are units of language which are basic in two senses, both:

1. in that they have meanings that are unpredictable and so must be listed in dictionaries

and

2. in that they are the building-blocks out of which phrases and sentences are formed.

However, much shorter than it actually is! So in what respects do 1. and 2. jointly fall short as a characterisation of words and their behavior? A large part of the answer lies in the fact that there are units of language that have characteristic 1. but not 2., and vice versa. First, we will deal with a distinction which, though important, is independent of the distinctions that apply to words in particular.