A
word is dead when it said some say. I say it just begins to live that day.
(Emily
Dickinson “A word”)
Every
speaker of every language knows thousands, even tens of thousands of words. The
biggest dictionaries that are published have over half a million entries, but no
speaker knows all these words. It is estimated that people who have completed
high school know, on average, about 60 000 words. University graduates must
know many more words, including many in this book that readers will be learning
for the first time. It has been estimated that children aged six might know as
many as 13 000 words learnt at the rate of 3250 a year, or an average of nine
new words a day since the age of two.
Words
are an important part of linguistic knowledge and constitute a component of our
mental grammars. But one can learn thousands of words in a language and still
not know the language. Anyone who has tried to make him- or herself understood
in a foreign country by simply using a dictionary knows this to be true. On the
other hand, without words we would be unable to convey our thoughts through
language.
What
is a word ? What do you know when you know a word ? Suppose your hear someone
say morpheme and haven’t the slightest idea what it means, and you you don’t
know what the “smallest unit of linguistic meaning” is called. Then you don’t
know the word morpheme. A particular string of sounds mus be united with a
meaning and meaning must be united with specific sounds in order for the sounds
or the meaning to be a word in our mental dictionaries. Once you learn both the
sounds and their meaning, you know the word. It becomes an entry in your mental
lexicon (the Greek word for dictionary).
Someone
who doesn’t know English would not know where one word begins or and in
hearing an utterance such as Thecatsatonthemat. We separate the written words
by spaces but in spoken language there are no pauses between most words.
Without knowledge of the language, it isn't even possible to tell how many word
have been said. A speaker of English, however, has no difficulty in segmenting
the sounds into the individual words : the, cat, sat, on, the, and mat.
Similarly, someone who doesn't know the Native American language, Potawatomi, would not know whether
kwapmuknanuk (which means “they say us”) was one, two, or more words. It is, in
fact, only one word.
The
lack of pauses between words in speech has provided humorists and songwriters
with much material. During World War II, the chorus of one of the Top Ten tunes
sung by Bing Crosby and Bob Hope used this fact about speech to amuse listeners
:
Mairzy
doats and dozy doats. Mares eat oats and does eat oats.
And
liddle lamzy divey, And little lambs eat ivy,
A
kiddley-divey too, A kid’ll eat ivy too,
Wouldn’t
you ? Wouldn’t you ?
The
fact that the same sounds can be interpreted differently, even between
languages, gave birth to an entertaining book. The little, Mots D’Heures:
Gousses, Rames, 1. Was derived from the fact that Mother Goose Rhymes, spoken
in English, root and branch’. The first rhyme in French starts :
Un
petit d’un petit
Setonne
aux Halles.
When
interpreted as if it were English it would sound like :
Humpty,
dumpty
Sat
on a wall.
This
shows that in a particular language, the form (sounds of pronunciation) and the
meaning of a word are like two sides of a coin. Un petit d’un petit. But in
English the sounds represent the name Humpty Dumpty. Couch and sofa, though
they have the same meaning, are two words because they are represented by two
different strings of sounds.
Similarly,
the sounds of the letters bear and bare represented four homonyms (or more
particularly, homophones), different words with the same sounds, as shown in
the sentences :
She
can’t bear (tolerate) children.
She
can’t bear (give birth to) children
Abear
is the mascot of one of our NRL teams.
He
stood there- bare and beautiful.
This
inseparability of the two aspects, sound and meaning, was pointed out by the
nineteenth-century Swisss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who discussed the
arbitrary union between the sounds (form) and meaning (concept) of the linguistic
sign, or word.
Sometimes
we think we know a word even though we don’t know what it means. It is hard to
find an English speaker who hasn't heard the
wordbantidisestablish-mentarianism; and most we tell you that it is the longest
word in the English language. Yet, many of these same persons are unsure as to
its meaning. According to the way we have defined what it means to ‘know a
word’ pairing a string of linguistic knowledge of a language, but general conceptual
knowledge about a language. Children do not learn such facts the way they learn
the sound/meaning correspondences of the words of their language. Both children
and adults have to be told that antidisestablishmentarianism is the longest
word in English or discover it through an analysis of a dictionary. Actually,
should they wish to research this question they would find that the longest
word recorded in at least one dictionary is
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolacnoconiosis, a disease of the lungs. As we
shall see in chapter 8, children don’t have to conduct such research’ they
learn words such as elephant, disappear, mother, and all the other words they
know without being taught them explicitly or looking them up in a dictionary.
Since
each word is a sound-meaning unit, each word stored in our mental dictionaries
most be listed with its unique phonological representation, which determines
its pronunciation, and with its meaning. For literate speakers, the spelling or
orthography of most of the words we know is also in our lexicons.
Each
word listed in your mental dictionary must include other information as well,
such as whether it is a noun, a pronoun, a verb, and adjective, an adverb, a
preposition, a conjunction. That is, it must specify its grammatical category,
or syntactic class. You may not consciously know that a form such as love is
listed as bot a verb and a noun, but a speaker has such knowledge, as shown by
the phrases i love you and you are the love of my life. If such information is
not in the mental dictionary, we would not know how to form grammatical
sentences, nor be able to distinguish grammatical from ungrammatical sentences.
The classes of words, the syntactic categories such as nouns,verbs,adjectives,
and so on and the semantic properties of words, which represent their meanings,
will be discussed in chapters 4 and 5.
1.
Luis d’Antin Van Rooten, ed. And annotator, 1993, Mots D’Heures: Gousses,
Rames. The d’Antin Manuscript,London:Grafton.
