What is a word?

Richard Hudson,

Dept of Phonetics and Linguistics,

University College London,

Gower Street,

London WC1E 6BT

r.hudson@ling.ucl.ac.uk

What is a word?

Abstract

Words typically combine properties from different levels, so they provide

the simplest point of contact between levels. On the other hand, there are

well-known mismatches between the word-like units of syntax and those

of morphophonology, and similar mismatches can be found between other

word-like units. How should linguistic theory accommodate these

mismatches without losing sight of the matches found in more typical

cases? And what kinds of words should we recognise? I offer a general

theory of word-types which is not tied to any particular theoretical

framework (though it uses some notation and concepts from Word

Grammar). I also discuss the Lexical Integrity Principle, and suggest a new

formulation of the principle which may explain why phonological and

morphological structure are `invisible' to syntax. I contrast the details of

this analysis with two recent discussions of word-types based on Lexical

Functional Grammar.

What is a word?

1. Background

What is a word? Linguists certainly ought to be able to answer this

question, as we all mention words in our grammars, and for some of us

the word is the most fundamental unit of language. It is easy to argue that

the question has no good answer because it has too many answers, all

reasonable but all incompatible with each other. For example, how many

words are there in "I'm tired"? By some definitions there are two, by

others three - but who's to say which of these definitions is the right one?

This looks like a good reason for rejecting the notion `word' out of hand as

a part of scientific linguistics; and yet the fact is that we all use it, and

most of us use it a lot.

Another approach to the question is to focus on typical words. After all,

most words (at least in English) are words by any imaginable criterion.

Take the last one in the previous sentence: criterion. This is a word for at

least the following reasons:

(1) a It is bounded by a word space and a punctuation mark.

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bIt has a single word-stress, which is fixed lexically.

c It corresponds to a lexical item; in lay terms, it would have a

separate entry in a dictionary.

d It is a noun.

e It is directly related by syntactic rules to two other words, any and

imaginable.

f It has a sense, the notion `criterion' - i.e. the same notion as the

French word critère.

g It cannot be broken down into smaller units whose meanings

combine to give this sense.

hThe ending -on could be recognised as a marker of singularity, but

neither it nor the rest of the word, criteri-, could be used on its own - i.e. it

is a `minimal free form' in Bloomfield's terminology.

This example is not isolated; in fact, it is quite typical, and we have to

search quite hard for the problem cases. The fact that so many

independent characteristics typically coincide in the same unit suggests

that these units are real and important. The word lives.

This approach is uncontroversial and correct as far as it goes, but it

does not go far enough because we still don't know how to answer our

original question: how many words are there in "I'm tired"? Clearly, we

need a more sophisticated notion of `word' so that we can distinguish at

least two kinds of words. Then we can say that there are two of one kind,

and three of the other. This conclusion is also uncontroversial, but the

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devil is in the detail. What kinds of word are there, and how are they

related to one another? The present paper is an attempt to answer these

questions.

One of the main roles of the word is as the dividing line between

morphology and syntax, with morphology responsible for its internal

structure and syntax responsible for its external relations to other words.

In the wild days of post-Bloomfieldian structuralism some linguists ignored

this division, and present-day transformational syntax is in some respects

a direct continuation of this tradition (Mathhews 1993:86), but I think

everyone would now agree that morphology is to at least some extent

different from syntax. A major issue in current research is how clear the

division between the two is. Can syntax `see' the internal structure of

words? And are word structures similar to syntactic structures? (In

principle the two questions are distinct - word structure could be visible to

syntax, but built on the same formal lines.) Linguists are deeply divided on

these two questions, with some answering yes to both and others no to

both. My own sympathies are with those who answer no, but I shall argue

in this paper that the answer has to be somewhat complicated precisely

because there are different kinds of word. I shall also suggest (rather

tentatively) why word structure should be invisible to syntax.

The immediate stimulus1 for the paper is the reading of two recent

1 There are two other reasons for writing the paper. One is that my fellow Word-grammarian And Rosta has been trying to persuade me for some months that syntactic words are distinct from phonological words; after resisting for months I now think he's right, so in a sense I'm simply fleshing out some of his ideas. The other reason for the paper is a question that Joan Bresnan asked me after a presentation on Word

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papers written in the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG):

Bresnan and Mchombo 1995 and Mohanan 1995. Both argue for some

version of the widely-accepted `Lexical Integrity Principle' (Carstairs-

McCarthy 1992:90, Spencer 1991:42, 425, Di Sciullo and Williams 1987,

Anderson 1992:22), which tries to define the division between word

structure and syntactic structure; and both offer a sophisticated theory of

words which recognises words at different levels. I shall disagree with

some of the details, but this paper is intended to be not only a

contribution to the same debate, but also a contribution in very much the

same spirit.

Most of the discussion will be theory-neutral, but the general view of

language is that of Word Grammar (Hudson 1984, 1990). One

characteristic of this theory is the very controversial claim that language

is a special case of general knowledge, so it is worth asking whether the

problems that we face in defining the word can be matched outside

language. Are there any concepts which are defined by a range of

concepts which typically, but not necessarily, coincide? The answer is, of

course, yes. Indeed, this is probably the normal situation for any concept,

as has been repeatedly argued since the early research of Rosch (1976).

The classic case is the notion `bird', which allows us to acknowledge

and explain the typical coincidence of wings, flying, feathers, beaks, two

legs, eggs and nest-building, but there are exceptional cases like penguins

and ostriches. Admittedly the example of `bird' is only indirectly relevant

Grammar at a recent workshop: What is a word? This paper is the answer I should like to have given.

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to the syntagmatic delimitation of words, because it involves the

classification of things which are already identified as individuals: an

ostrich is undoubtedly a whole bird rather than a part of one or a

collection of birds. A better analogy outside language would be the notion

`day', which combines a number of distinct characteristics - 24 hours,

rising and setting of the sun, a unit of working, sleeping and eating, and

so on. The units delimited by these various criteria typically coincide, but

need not. As a measure of time we recognise a day from mid-afternoon to

mid-afternoon, but this is not relevant either to sunrise and sunset or to

work, sleep and food; and if we take sunrise and sunset as the bounds of a

day (as we do when we contrast day and night), then the 24-hour period is

irrelevant. But it would be perverse to use these possible mismatches as

evidence against the notion `day' as a unifying concept, just as it would

be to pay undue attention to the special needs of airline passengers and

astronauts.

My aim in this paper, therefore, is to offer a theory of words which

recognises the fundamental unity of the notions defined by the various

levels, while also allowing enough flexibility to accommodate the various

mismatches that are found in natural languages (and which can perhaps

be explained in functional terms, though that is a different topic which I

shall not attempt to tackle here).

2. A preliminary typology of mismatches

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We start with a theory-neutral survey of the difficult cases. What kinds of

phenomena break the simple coincidence of phonology, syntax and

semantics found in dog and sees? Of course the question presupposes

that we can identify word-like units at each of these levels, because

otherwise we cannot recognise either harmony or disharmony. So that we

can talk about these units we could call them `phonological words',

`syntactic words' and `semantic words', though I shall offer a more

sophisticated classification below. In principle we could also recognise

`morphological words' (as recommended for example in di Sciullo and

Williams (1987) and Bresnan and Mchombo (1995)), but in the vast

majority of cases these will coincide with phonological words even if not

with syntactic or semantic words, so for the present I shall ignore the

cases of mismatch (discussed for example in Anderson 1994:18 and

Spencer 1991:42), though I shall return to the distinction in a later section.

In the meantime I shall use the rather cumbersome name

`morphophonological word' to refer without distinction to morphological

and phonological words. Another word-like unit is the lexeme, lexical item

or `listeme' (Di Sciullo and Williams 1987), i.e. the unit of storage in

competence (e.g. the word-form sees is an example of the lexeme SEE).

But questions of storage and abstraction are matters of paradigmatic

classification, so they are orthogonal to the essentially syntagmatic

questions of this paper and I shall ignore them.

In the following discussion, therefore, I shall distinguish just three kinds

of word-like units: morphophonological, syntactic and semantic. It will be

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helpful to have abbreviated names for use in formulae, so I shall call them

respectively P, S and C (for `content'). We can now classify known

mismatches according to the levels involved. For example, `S+S = P'

means `two successive syntactic words corresponding to a single

morphophonological word'. Table 1 summarises the cases that we shall

consider.

mismatch

pattern

phenomenon

A. S+S = P clitics, incorporation, fusion

B. S = P+P two-word compounds, `phrasal words'

C. C+C = S ??

D. C = S+S idioms

E. (S) = P hesitation forms?

F. S = (P) zero words??

G. (C) = S expletives and other semantically empty words

H. C = (S) arguments left implicit by omission of optional

complements

I. S/S = P words that require dual classification, e.g. participles

J. C/C = S metaphors, loose reference?

Table 1

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A. S+S = P: Two successive syntactic words corresponding to a single

morphophonological word.

In the most familiar cases, the two syntactic words keep their separate

morphophonological identities within the larger morphophonological word.

The phenomena concerned are cliticization and incorporation, in which

a `reduced' word joins a `host' word as part of a larger

morphophonological word. It is called cliticization if the reduced word is a

semantically empty word (such as a pronoun or illocutionary particle), and

incorporation if it is a semantically full word such as a noun or adjective.

Here are some standard examples, in which the square brackets surround

the relevant morphophonological word and the word-spaces separate

syntactic words.

We illustrate cliticization from French:

(2) Paul [en mange] beaucoup.

Paul of-it eats much. `Paul eats a lot of it.'

The pronoun en is a clitic, with the verb mange as its host. The most

obvious and arguably the best syntactic analysis takes en as a dependent

of beaucoup, with exactly the same syntactic status as a full prepositional

phrase such as de fromage. However as far as phonology is concerned,

the best analysis takes en mange as a single unit - clitic pronouns never

have a separate word-stress. Moreover, if morphophonological words also

provide the domain of morphology, as I assume, the rules for morpheme-

order explain the rigidly fixed (and exceptional) position of en before

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mange. In short, there are good reasons for analysing en as a separate

syntactic word, but equally good reasons for analysing it as part of the

larger morphophonological word en mange.

For incorporation we turn to West-Greenlandic Eskimo (Sadock

1987:287):

(3)Hansi angisuu-mik qimme-qar-poq

Hans(abs) big-inst dog-have-indic/3s. `Hans has a big dog.'

In this example the `reduced word' is qimme, `dog'. According to Sadock,

the best syntactic analysis would recognise this as a separate word, with

angisuu-mik as a modifier agreeing with it in case (although qimme itself

does not carry a case morpheme). In contrast, there are strong

phonological and morphological reasons for not recognising qimme as a

separate morphophonological word.

In both cliticization and incorporation, the reduced word is

morphophonologically distinct from its host, although both form part of a

larger morphophonological word. Alongside these cases we can recognise

others where there is no clear boundary in the phonology between the

two. We can call this pattern fusion, though it could be simply a case of

extreme reduction of clitics or incorporated words. It can easily be

illustrated from English, where some cliticized verbs can also be fused

with their host into a single indivisible morphophonological word; for

example, you are can be reduced (by cliticization) to you're, with exactly

the same pronunciation as your; worse still, in a non-rhotic accent it has

the same pronunciation as yaw, where the verb and pronoun have fused

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into a single CV structure whose V belongs equally to both the syntactic

words and the second word has no separate phonology at all. Similarly, in

French the sequence de le, `of the', is fused as du, though in this case the

fusion is obligatory. One might even argue that English today is a fusion of

this day, explaining the gap in the series this morning, this afternoon, this

evening, *this day (Rosta 1996, in preparation).

The essential point about all these three subtypes of our first mismatch-

category is that they involve a single morphophonological word which

corresponds to (at least) two distinct syntactic words: S+S = P. The

differences among the subtypes are less important, and may turn out to

be unreal, or matters of degree. The difference between clitics and

incorporation may be as blurred as the corresponding difference between

function words and lexical words; and as we saw in the English example of

you're, cliticization may overlap with fusion. The main challenge for

theories of language structure is to allow enough flexibility in the mapping

from syntax to phonology, without however treating these mismatched

cases as the normal pattern.

Having established the reality of mismatches, we shall move more

quickly through the remaining mismatch patterns.

B. S = P+P: One syntactic word corresponding to two

morphophonological words. This pattern may be illustrated by some kinds

of English compound, such as steely-eyed or head-over-heels, with two

word-stresses, or sixth sense, whose first element ends in a consonant

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cluster /ksþ/ which is normally found only at the end of a word.

Presumably so-called `phrasal words' such as good for nothing and French

trompe-l'oeil, `illusion', belong in this category (Spencer 1991:426).

C. C + C = S: Two semantic units corresponding to a single syntactic

word. In our present state of ignorance about lexical semantic structure

it's impossible to decide whether this pattern is possible. [22 October

1999: inflectional morphology: Dog + Plural = dogs]

D. C = S + S: One semantic unit corresponding to two (or more) syntactic

words. This is a standard definition of an idiom, such as hot dog or kick

the bucket.

The above examples involve many-to-one mismatches. The next four

cases have a word on one level which does not correspond to anything at

all on the next level.

E. (S) = P: A morphophonological word which does not correspond to

anything at all in the syntax. Maybe this description fits hesitation forms

such as English er and um, contrasting with Scottish English eeh, French

eu and so on - words which are clearly learned and part of one's linguistic

competence, and which fit the general morphophonological patterns of

the language concerned, but which have no status at all in syntactic

structure.

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F. S = (P): Morphophonologically zero words. In a surface-oriented

approach to grammar there have to be extremely compelling reasons for

recognising syntactic words which are inaudible. There are some good

candidates (such as the zero copula which exists in African-American

English according to Labov 1969), but alternative analyses are always

possible, so I don't know whether or not to recognise this possibility. [22

October 1999: yes: PRO]

G. (C) = S: Semantically empty words. These almost certainly exist,

though the issue is still controversial. Expletive pronouns are strong

candidates for semantic emptiness, but greetings and so on may also not

have any meaning in terms of semantic structures as such.

H. C = (S): Implicit semantic elements. These are commonplace.

Wherever a (syntactic) complement is optional, the semantic element that

it would have expressed becomes implicit; e.g. shave always has two

arguments (in the semantics), but the shave-ee may be implicit as in He

shaved after cleaning his teeth.

In all the examples discussed so far we have considered numerical

mismatches, where a single word on one level corresponds either to a

sequence of more than one or to less than one element on another. The

two remaining categories illustrate another possibility:

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I. S/S = P: Single morphophonological words that qualify simultaneously

as two different (and conflicting) syntactic words. For instance, in many

languages participles are normal verbs in their syntactic valency, but are

normal adjectives both in their distribution and in their inflectional

features. The following Latin example illustrates the point:

(4) Caesare forum ingresso, vulgus exclamavit.

Caesar(Abl) the-forum(Acc) having-entered(Abl), the-crowd shouted.

`When Caesar had entered the forum the crowd shouted.'

The word ingresso is a verb in relation to its object, the accusative noun

forum, but it is an adjective agreeing in gender, number and case with its

subject, the ablative noun Caesare. One interpretation of this behaviour is

to recognise ingresso as two distinct syntactic words, a verb and an

adjective, both mapped onto the same morphophonological unit. In the

syntactic structure, the verb and adjective are related asymmetrically: as

a dependent word it is an adjective, but it is a verb in relation to the words

that depend on it.

J. C/C = S: Two distinct and conflicting semantic elements corresponding

to one syntactic word. Maybe this description fits cases of extended

meaning such as metaphors (He is a pig) or loose reference (Plato is on

the top shelf).

To summarise the discussion, the range of possible mismatches

between word-like units defined at the three levels of syntax, phonology

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and semantics may exhaust the range of logical possibilities. This

appearance may of course be deceptive, and may be simply the result of

using such a crude classification system; maybe a more subtle approach

would reveal logical possibilities which are never realised in any language.

Meanwhile we can at least conclude that non-prototypical words are a

very serious element in the total picture of language, and that however

important the prototypical `harmonious' word may be, we must provide

machinery for handling the less harmonious cases as well.

3. C-structure and f-structure words?

This typology of word-types and mismatches rests on minimal theoretical

assumptions, but of course any set of minimal assumptions is

controversial because some theories go further. In particular, where I have

assumed a single level of syntax responsible for all syntactic matters - for

word-order, agreement, valency, case-marking and so on, others

recognise more than one syntactic structure. Transformational theory

allows any number of different syntactic structures for the same sentence,

so subtypes of `syntactic word' could proliferate unless checked by some

principle; for example analyses of incorporation based on head-movement

following Baker (1988) allow a unit which is a word in one structure to be

transformed into a word-part in another. I have to ignore all these

analyses because of all the profound theoretical issues which they raise.

More relevant is the much more modest (and reasonable) distinction

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which is made in Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) between just two

syntactic structures, c-structure (or categorial structure) and f-structure

(functional structure). Of these, c-structure is entirely responsible for word

order, and it is at c-structure that the principle of `Lexical Integrity' is

claimed to hold (Bresnan and Mchombo 1995, Mohanan 1995). As

explained earlier, the essence of this principle is to separate the structure

within a word (morphology) from the structures that contain it (syntax), in

contrast with transformational analyses which allow syntactic rules and

principles to apply to some parts of word-structure. Personally I accept

this principle wholeheartedly in relation to inflectional morphology, but I

doubt if it can be right as it is expressed in Bresnan and Mchombo

(ibid:181):

(5).. the lexical integrity principle, which states that words are built out of

different structural elements and by different principles of

composition than syntactic phrases.

This formulation appears in an article on noun-markers in Bantu

languages which argues (convincingly) that noun-markers are of two types

at c-structure. Take the following example from Chishona (ibid:195), in

which there are two noun-markers belonging respectively to class 16

(p(a)) and to class 3 (mu or zero).

(6) pa-mu-shá uyo p-ósé p-a-káchén-a

16-3-home that(3) 16-all 16-white `all those white homes'

The evidence shows clearly that class 3 markers are part of the c-

structure word that contains the lexical root to which they are attached -

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in this case, mu-shá. However it is equally clear that class 16 markers are

separate syntactic words which combine not with a root but with a whole

phrase; in our example, pa- combines with the phrase -mu-shá uyo, `that

home', in which uyo agrees in the normal way with the head noun, while

the other two adjectives modify pa-. This distinction is not restricted to

classes 3 and 16, but applies generally to all locative markers (which

include 16) in contrast with the rest. Locatives are like independent nouns

or determiners, while the rest are prefixes.

How well do these results support Bresnan and Mchombo's Lexical

Integrity Principle? What is striking is the way in which Bantu class-

markers straddle the division between syntax and morphology, with the

locative markers in syntax and the others in morphology. According to the

principle, "words are built out of different structural elements ... than

syntactic phrases", and yet the two sets of markers are extremely similar,

to the extent that other Bantu linguists and the standard orthographies

have given them the same status, as noun-class markers. One of the main

points of similarity is that they are all attached rigidly before a lexical root,

which is the kind of fact which one would expect to be expressed in c-

structure; and yet it is precisely in c-structure that Bresnan and Mchombo

propose to distinguish the two cases. Moreover, the principle says that

"words are built by different principles of composition than syntactic

phrases" - and yet the two kinds of marker do seem to be combined with

the following material by very similar `principles of composition'. In short,

there are important similarities between the locative and other markers,

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as well as the important differences which Bresnan and Mchombo

highlight. If we conclude (with them) that the locative markers are simply

words which function as `nominal constituents' (ibid:212), then we have

no explanation for why they are so morpheme-like.

An alternative, which combines the virtues of the Bresnan and

Mchombo analysis with those of a more traditional analysis, recognises a

mismatch between morphophonological and syntactic words. The locative

markers are separate syntactic words but parts of morphophonological

words - in short, they are clitics. The orthography reflects the division into

morphophonological words, as in our earlier example pa-mu-shá uyo p-ósé

p-a-káchén-a, with pa-mu-shá as a single morphophonological word; but

within it pa- and mu- have different statuses in syntax, with pa- as a

separate word and mu- as just a prefix. The agreement facts can be

attributed to the words concerned - the (clitic) noun pa- belongs to class

16 while the full noun mu-shá belongs to class 3. If this analysis is correct,

then it counts as evidence against Bresnan and Mchombo's formulation of

the Lexical Integrity Principle, because the locative markers are shared by

morphology and by syntax - as parts of (morphophonoligical) words and

as parts of phrases2.

2 I am not sure how this distinction between morphophonological and syntactic words relates to the LFG distinction between c- and f-structure. Since c-structure is responsible for surface word order, one would expect its units to be complete morphophonological words, such as pa-mu-shá, in contrast with Bresnan and Mchombo's analysis, in which pa- is a separate c-structure word. If pa- and mu- have the same status at c-structure, the syntactic difference between them must be shown at f-structure - but this is precisely where Bresnan and Mchombo argue that their similarities are shown. In short, we have a choice between two quite different analyses.

▪ According to Bresnan and Mchombo, pa- and mu- are syntactically 21

In conclusion, Bresnan and Mchombo's evidence can be taken as

support for an analysis of pa- as a clitic, which means that it is an example

of an element which belongs both to word-structure and to phrase-

structure - precisely the kind of pattern which Bresnan and Mchombo

intend their Lexical Integrity Principle to exclude. However I believe the

problem lies only in the details. There is very strong evidence for

distinguishing sharply between syntax and morphology. As Bresnan and

Mchombo point out, for example (ibid:181), word order is always to at

least some extent free, but morpheme order is always absolutely fixed - a

really striking difference. What is problematic about Bresnan and

Mchombo's formulation is that it makes no allowance for the kinds of

mismatch that we have been considering in this paper. In particular it

does not allow for cliticization or incorporation. As we have seen, the dual

status of pa- arises from the fact that it is a clitic. In the next paragraph

we shall consider an example of incorporation.

Mohanan (1995) is an account of noun-incorporation in Hindi, which

very conveniently also assumes the LFG framework and a somewhat

different version of the Lexical Integrity principle (which we shall consider

in section 5). She discusses examples like the following (ibid:78):

similar (they both trigger agreement), but also different (pa- is a syntactic word). The similarity is shown at f-structure, the difference at c-structure. Maybe there would be an extra level of structure where the morphological similarities would be shown, but this would map onto c-structure (where they are different) rather than onto f-structure (where they are the same).

▪ In the proposed reanalysis, pa is a syntactic word, as is mu-shá. Both are nouns, and both trigger agreement. There is only one syntactic structure. In terms of morphophonological words, however, pa-mu-shá is a single morphophonological word, one of whose parts is the syntactic word pa-.

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(7) ilaa bacce khojtii rahtii hai.

Ila-Nom children-Nom search-HAB PROG be-PR.

`Ila keeps children-searching'

The evidence presented shows overwhelmingly that bacce, `children', is a

word-part, prefixed to the verb, rather than an independent noun-phrase:

in other words, it is incorporated into the verb's structure. The c-structure

word bacce-k h ojtii means something like `children-search', in contrast with

otherwise similar sentences in which bacce is marked as accusative, and

is a separate noun-phrase:

(8) ilaa baccõ-ko khojtii rahtii hai.

Ila-Nom children-Acc search-HAB PROG be-PR

`Ila keeps searching for the/some children.'

In this case bacco- can refer to specific children, but in the incorporated

example it has to be taken generically.

Now one of the most interesting facts about noun-incorporation in Hindi

is that some sentences are ambiguous between the two analyses. For

example (ibid:104), (9) can be taken as referring either to specific books,

or to books in a generic way.

(9)anil-ne kitaabe~ becĩĩ.

Anil-Erg(M) book-Nom.PL(F) sell-PERF.F.PL

(a) Anil sold books.

(b) Anil did book-selling.

This is interesting because it runs directly counter to the predictions of

Bresnan and Mchombo's Lexical Integrity principle. In one c-structure

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analysis kitaabe~ is part of a phrase, whereas in the other it is part of a

word; but according to the principle, phrases and words are built out of

different elements. Moreover these elements seem to be combined with

one another in very similar ways - for example both trigger object-

agreement on the verb, and both saturate the verb's capacity for taking

an object. A rigid application of the Lexical Integrity principle would force

us at least to recognise two distinct words kitaabe~, one functioning as a

word-part and the other as a phrase-part; but this would surely be wrong.

Once again the problem is easily solved in terms of morphophonological

and syntactic words, with some mismatching: incorporation involves a

single morphophonological word containing two syntactic words. Fig. 1

shows Word-Grammar structures for the two analyses of example (9). (I

follow Mohanan (ibid:82) in analysing the ergative marker -ne as a clitic;

but the corrolary of that, I assume, is that the unmarked so-called

`nominative' is actually case-less.) In Fig. 1, the essential point is that

morphophonological words are indicated by square brackets, so the sole

difference between the two lies in the square brackets which enclose the

object and verb in the second analysis but not in the first.

Fig. 1

The analysis that I am proposing is very similar to Sadock's autolexical

analysis (1985, 1991) which Mohanan considers and rejects (ibid:112).

Like Sadock, I am suggesting that incorporation involves a mismatch

between syntactic and morphophonological words, rather than between c-

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structure and f-structure words as Mohanan suggests (ibid:129). However,

my analysis also shares the virtues of Mohanan's analysis compared with

Sadock's. On the one hand, my structures label functions directly on the

arcs, so they `factor out' functions and word order rather than conflating

them (ibid:112). And on the other, like Mohanan's my analysis explains

why incorporated nouns cannot be modified or coordinated (ibid:113). The

reason is quite simply that every element inside a morphophonological

word must have a place in the latter's structural template, but the

template makes no allowance for modifiers or coordinated elements. This

solves the Hindi problem, but creates a more general problem: how to

cope with those languages where modifiers are allowed, as in the example

of incorporation in Eskimo that I quoted earlier (3). Mohanan recognises

the problem (ibid:116) but offers no solution; like her I must leave it as a

dangling loose end.

In conclusion, I have argued that there is no need to recognise two

distinct types of syntactic word, defined at the levels of c-structure and f-

structure. The evidence from Bantu classifiers and Hindi noun-

incorporation supports the more familiar distinction between

morphophonological words and syntactic words, with some mismatching.

More negatively, I have also argued against the Lexical Integrity principle

as formulated by Bresnan and Mchombo, but without (yet) putting forward

my own alternative. This must wait until the last section.

4. A theory of word-types

25

What, then, is a word? At a first approximation, as we have seen, it is the

smallest unit which brings together a pattern of sounds, a meaning and a

syntactic function - a unit which is simultaneously a morphophonological

word, a semantic word and a syntactic word. For very many languages

this is a fair description of their typical words, and of the majority of their

word-types and word-tokens. Maybe the same is true of every language,

even of those with extensive incorporation and cliticisation. The trouble is

that this typical view makes no provision for the mismatches that we have

surveyed. The fact is that a phonological word need not correspond to a

single syntactic word, or vice versa, and similarly for the units of

semantics and syntax. How can we revise linguistic theory without

throwing out the baby (the typical word) with the bathwater (the rigidity

which excludes the mismatches)?

The essence of the answer lies in the use of default inheritance, one of

the `pillars' not only of Word Grammar (Hudson 1990:chapter 3) but also

of various other theories (Langacker 1990, Pollard and Sag 1994). We shall

recognise abstract concepts for each of our general word-types:

`morphophonolical word', `syntactic word', `semantic word'; and we shall

allow some (exceptional) words to belong to just one of these types,

inheriting from it whatever characteristics are peculiar to it. For example,

in the French sentence Paul le mange, le is a syntactic and semantic word

without being a morphophonological word; and conversely the cluster le

mange is a morphophonological word without being a syntactic or

26

semantic word. For such cases some kind of `correspondence rule'

(Jackendoff 1983, 1990) will be responsible for mapping one kind of word

onto another. Correspondence rules must be flexible enough to handle all

the mismatches we surveyed earlier, but sufficiently rigid to exclude

`unnatural' patterns (whatever these may turn out to be). [22 October

1999: Not correspondence rules!!]

As a very simple example of the kind of grammar I have in mind, here

are some rules which would generate this sentence: [22 October 1999:

Maybe have typical ‘word’, plus ‘clitic’ etc as exceptions.]

(10) a le is a noun, but not a morphophonological word.

bmange needs a noun as object.

c Morphophonological words follow the word on which they depend.

d[le + verb] is a morphophonological word.

These rules would allow le (as a noun) to be the object of mange, but (as a

non-morphophonological word) its position would not be controlled by the

general rule for a head-initial language such as French (rule c). Instead, it

would take its place in the purely morphophonological word defined by

rule d. (In reality, of course, some of these rules would be expressed in

much more general terms, but this is a separate issue.) The structures

generated would be like the one in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2

This diagram shows that le is a syntactic word whereas le mange is a

morphophonological one, with the two related by a vertical

27

`correspondence' line.

The main question is what we should say about the other words in this

sentence, Paul and mange. Are they too both morphophonological and

syntactic words - i.e. a two-level pair linked by correspondence rule? More

generally, suppose we recognise n different word-types, does this commit

us to saying that every single straightforward word is actually n different

words mapped onto each other by correspondence rule? This seems to be

the consequence of Mohanan's proposal that we should distinguish two

kinds of phonological word - metrical and prosodic - and two kinds of

syntactic word - categorial and functional (ibid:129).

This seems perverse. For one thing, different languages seem to need

different ranges of word-types. Evidence that one language has some

word-type is certainly evidence that linguistic theory should accommodate

that word-type, but not that it should be built into the structure of every

single language. A related objection involves the process of language-

acquisition. Can we assume that the various word-types are learned on

the basis of experience? At present this seems quite a reasonable

assumption, but if word-types are learnable, the learner could start with a

very simple theory of words based solely on the prototypical harmonious

word. Extra word-types could then be separated out as and when

experience seemed to require them. This view of acquisition leaves open

the possibility of learning word-types, in contrast with the view of a

uniform range of word-types shared by all languages.

Let us assume, therefore, that word-types are distinguished only when

28

necessary - only when this is demanded by the facts of the language

concerned. What does this mean for ordinary words like Paul and mange?

Do we need to recognise anything more than just a single word in each

case, which combines all the characteristics of morphophonological,

syntactic and semantic words? This is certainly a simple and attractive

conclusion, which we should accept unless we have good reasons for

doing otherwise; but I think such reasons may in fact exist. Even if the

child starts with a simple model in which each word has a pronunciation, a

word-class and a meaning, it is a fact of everyone's life that words have

variable pronunciations. Phonological variables are well documented in

sociolinguistics (Hudson 1996), and are rife in every community. What the

child notices, however, is that these variations have nothing whatsoever

to do with either syntax or meaning - from a syntactic and semantic point

of view, the words house and 'ouse are exactly the same (not just

approximately the same). Interestingly, and somewhat surprisingly,

sociolinguists have not noticed any tendency for pronunciation variables

to be linked to semantic or syntactic variables, even in words that have

various meanings as well as various pronunciations. For example, it would

be easy to imagine a community specialising house for one kind of

building and 'ouse for another; but this does not in fact happen3. Similarly

in languages with inflectional morphology: the child learns early in life that

details of morphology - declension-classes, morphological irregularities

3 It is true that alternative inflections tend to acquire distinct meanings, such as the distinction between regular and irregular hang (hanged with criminals, hung with pictures). However this is quite rare, and no such tendency seems to apply to purely phonological and phonetic variation.

29

and so on - have nothing to do with syntax or meaning.

What all this may suggest is that we learn through early experience to

dissociate matters of pronunciation and morphology from matters of

syntax and meaning. How can we model this dissociation in a formal

theory? One possibility is a model in which even ordinary words involve a

pairing of one or more phonological word with one or more syntactic and

semantic word. This is quite different from the traditional idea of words as

`signs' which pair sounds with meanings (e.g. the idea that sees is nothing

but the pairing of /si:z/ with the meaning `sees'); one of the weaknesses

of this idea is that it makes no provision for either morphology or syntax.

In the model we are now considering, what we think of as the word sees is

actually a pairing of two words, each of which combines a number of

characteristics. One is the morphophonological word /si:z/1 which is

distinct from the homophone seize, /si:z/2, but probably the same as the

plural noun seas. The other is the `syntacto-semantic' word SEEpres-3, the

third-person singular present tense form of the lexeme SEE. [22 October

1999: maybe there’s a list of morphemes, which constitute P words?]

The morphophonological word is defined by its internal structure while

the syntactico-semantic word is defined by its external relations to other

words and to meaning, so we can replace these cumbersome terms by the

much more convenient terms `in-word' and `out-word'. Fig. 3 illustrates

this view of the relationships among in- and out-words.

Fig. 3

30

What, then, is a word? If every apparent word is actually a pairing of an

in-word with an out-word, what role is left for the notion `word' itself?

There are two roles, one certain and the other possible. The certain one is

that of capturing what is common to all the different word-types which we

have distinguished. The familiar formal characteristics of words are not

shared, because these are what distinguish the various word-types from

each other - some have phonological characteristics but no syntactic or

semantic ones, for others the reverse is true, and so on. What else is left

for words to share? According to Word Grammar, there are several other

characteristics (Hudson 1990:82). First, every word belongs to some

identifiable language (or language-variety). Normally an English in-word is

paired with an English out-word, but in cases of language-contact

languages could be mixed - e.g. a French pronunciation (of a name or a

food-word) paired with English syntax. Second, every word is an action

performed by one person (the speaker) and intended for another (the

addressee), and experience allows us to relate specific words to specific

types of speaker and addressee - COOKIE is spoken typically by an

American, GEE-GEE is spoken typically to a small child, and so on (Hudson

1996:256). Once again in- and out-words usually agree, but need not - for

example, the American COOKIE may be used with a British pronunciation.

The message is mixed, but such confusion is part of everyday life and

must be accommodated theoretically. In short, there are some

characteristics shared by all words, which can be generalised by

recognising `word' as a super-type.

31

The other role for `word' is less certain. Maybe words could replace the

correspondence relations shown in Fig. 3? For example, as well as the out-

word SEEpres-3 and the in-word /si:z/1 we could recognise the word sees as a

unit which has an out-word as its `signified' and an in-word as its

`signifier', much like the traditional sign. Admittedly this would give formal

status to the common-sense notion of word, but why should we want to do

this? Would the word sees play any part at all in the grammar? That is,

would there be any facts which require us to refer to sees rather than to

either its out-word or its in-word? At present I cannot see any work which

can only be done by sees, so I conclude that it would actually be

redundant, so we should leave it to Ocam's razor.

Fig. 4 shows how the notions `out-word', `in-word' and `word' are

related in this model, with the first two as special cases of the third: just

as SEEpres-3 `isa' out-word, out-word `isa' word.

Fig. 4

In the typical case of use each out-word is paired with just one in-word

and vice versa (though these single words may have been chosen from a

range of alternatives). However all our examples of mismatches involved

some kind of departure from this pattern. For example, you're is a single

in-word which corresponds to a sequence of two out-words, while steely-

eyed reverses this relationship.

Each of the word-types is the collecting point for a range of

generalisations, illustrated by the following:

32

(11) aAn in-word has a single word-accent.

b An in-word may have at most one inflectional suffix.

c An in-word must contain at least one syllable.

(12) a An out-word must depend on some other out-word.

b A noun isa out-word.

c An out-word has a referent.

In addition, they each inherit from the super-type `word' various

properties such as the following:

(13) aA word has (i.e. belongs to) a language.

b A word has a speaker.

c A word has an addressee.

For most purposes there is no need to recognise more word-like

concepts than these three, but we have also seen that in some cases finer

distinctions have to be made. For example, as mentioned earlier there are

languages in which morphological words are distinct from phonological

ones, and there are others in which distinct types of phonological words

must be recognised: a simple example of this is given by Spencer

(1991:42), who reports that Finnish compound words such as

pääkaupunki, `capital city', count as a single phonological word with

respect to stress, but as two with respect to vowel harmony. (Mohanan

1995 makes a similar distinction between metrical and prosodic

phonolocal words.)

Similarly we have recognised the need to distinguish syntactic and

semantic words because of idioms. We could even subdivide `syntactic

33

word' further, according to whether the characteristics concerned are

relevant to the superordinate word on which the word depends or to the

subordinate words which depend on it. (The obvious terms are `up-word'

and `down-word'.) This distinction was implied by our discussion of the

`S/S = P' mismatch category, where we noted that participles combine the

characteristics of adjectives with those of verbs: as `up-words' they are

adjectives, but as `down-words' verbs. [22 October 1999: Not needed, in

view of my analysis of gerunds.]

A diagram like the one in Fig. 5 may therefore be needed for some

languages in which all these possibilities for disharmony are exploited. In

this diagram it is possible, for example, to be a phonological word without

also being a morphological word, but it is not possible to be a phonological

word without being a word - all the word-like units inherit from `word'.

There is no need to assume the maximum number of distinctions for all

languages just because they occur in some languages; so there may well

be languages for which the simple diagram in Fig. 4 is enough.

Fig. 5

To summarise this theory of word-types, ordinary words are a pairing of

an in-word with an out-word. The status of the `ordinary words' is

uncertain, and a word like dog or sees may not exist as such in the

grammar, in contrast with the corresponding in-word and out-word. In a

sense `the word dog' is a correspondence rule (Jackendoff 1996) because

it relates the out-word DOGsing to the in-word /dog/; but this is a misleading

34

description because all the other word-types that we have considered are

not relationships but concepts - nodes in a web of relationships to other

concepts which define characteristics such as `belongs to the English

language'.

This is the essential basic theory of words in Word Grammar. However,

alongside these basics we recognise the possibility of more specialised

word-types - words whose characteristics are just a subset of the normal

range of either out- or in-words, and which can therefore be described as

`phonological words' and so on. We also recognise the possibility of more

complex correspondence rules than the normal one:one relationships,

which are needed to handle the various types of mismatch that we have

recognised.

5. The Lexical Integrity principle

We can now return to the Lexical Integrity principle, whose spirit is the

widely shared belief that syntactic rules should not be responsible for

word-structure. Although I fully accept the spirit, I criticised Bresnan and

Mchombo's specific formulation. How, then, should it be formulated?

How about Mohanan's formulation (ibid:131)?

(14) Lexical categories cannot be created in the phrasal (=postlexical)

module, and phrasal categories cannot be created in the lexical

module.

This presupposes a meaningful distinction between lexical and postlexical

35

modules of the grammar, and a derivational view of generation in which

elements are `created'. Word Grammar rejects both of these assumptions.

As in several other theories, the grammar is a single seemless whole

whose elements range from the very specific (particular uses of particular

lexemes) to the very general (the notion `word'), with no formal or

substantive threshold or boundary between the two. In particular, there

can be no division between lexical and phrasal `modules'. Nor does it

make sense to ask where an element is `created', since every element is

built up partly by direct retrieval and partly by inheritance of features. In

any case, we all know that whole phrases can be stored (e.g. as clichés or

idioms), which is normally considered a characteristic of lexical items. It

seems therefore that Mohanan's formulation is tied to specific theoretical

assumptions that are at best controversial.

What exactly is it that we want the Lexical Integrity principle to

exclude? The main points seem to be these:

a. Inflectional affixes should be invisible to syntax (in contrast with

transformational analyses in which they are treated as separate functional

categories); the minimal units of syntax must be words, not morphemes.

b1. The order of word-parts should be ensured by a more rigid device than

the order of words; word-part order is never free.

b2. Word-parts cannot be multiplied as words can (by coordination or

modification).

b3. Word-parts cannot be moved by syntactic operations such as

extraction.

36

The main thing that we do not want to exclude is the possibility of out-

words being part of in-words because both cliticization and incorporation

realise precisely this possibility. In other words, we cannot say that word-

structure, as such, is invisible to syntax; rather, the gist of point (a) is that

any word is visible to syntax, wherever it occurs, but morphemes are not

visible to syntax. Inflectional morphemes are relevant to syntax, but only

via their contributions to a word's inflectional features (tense, number and

so on). For example, the English words dogs, mice and deer all have very

different morphological structures, but as far as the syntax is concerned

the only fact that is relevant is that they are plural. How plurality is

signalled is a matter of morphology and certainly not of syntax. This is the

main point of Zwicky's (1992) Principle of Morphology-free Syntax.

The proposed theory of word-types allows us to express this principle,

but can we explain it? Why should word-structure - whether

morphological or phonological - never be directly relevant to sentence-

structure? Maybe we can, though the explanation must be tentative. One

possibility is the distinction between out-words and in-words which we

have recognised as fundamental and applicable to all words. If out-words

are (by definition) what syntax can refer to, it cannot refer to (`see') the

morphological or phonological properties of words simply because out-

words do not have such properties. They only have them indirectly, via

the in-words to which they correspond. For example, it would be

impossible for some syntactic rule to apply selectively to plural nouns

according to whether or not they contained the regular suffix, because

37

plural nouns (as such) do not contain suffixes. This is a morphological

characteristic of in-words, but plural nouns are out-words, not in-words.

The three points under (b) are all concerned with the principles that

govern combinations of word-parts. A widely-accepted view is that word-

parts fill a rigid `matrix' of slots; e.g. for French the matrix for the verb-

clitic in-word allows up to seven clitics before a finite verb

(je/tu/il/elle/nous/vous + ne + me/te/se/nous/vous + le/la/les + lui/leur + y

+ en), and for a finite verb it allows stem + infinitive + tense +

person/number. This rigid ordering always takes priority over the relatively

loose ordering imposed by syntax (Sadock 1985), which is why clitics have

to line up in their host words rather than where the normal rules of syntax

would place them. The syntactic status of these clitics is irrelevant to their

positioning; for example, the French word en occurs in the same position

(immediately before the nearest superordinate verb) whether it means

`some' or whether it means `of it', although it is a direct dependent of the

verb in the first case and only an indirect dependent in the second:

(15) a Paul en mange. `Paul eats some.'

b Paul en mange beaucoup. `Paul eats some of it.'

The difference between the organising principles of morphology and of

syntax is the target of Zwicky's other principle, the Principle of Syntax-free

Morphology. Seen in terms of a dependency-based theory of syntax, this

difference is easily expressed. Word-structure is handled (as one would

expect) in terms of constituent-structure (with the word as the mother and

the constituent parts as daughters occupying places in a matrix provided,

38

appropriately, by the mother). In contrast, sentence-structure is handled

in terms of dependency-structure, with larger units (phrases, sentences

and so on) playing no part at all. These two sets of organising principle are

fundamentally different and may follow very simply from the distinction

between in-words (which have internal structure) and out-words (which do

not, but which combine with other words).

To conclude, I have tried to lay the foundations for a general theory of

word-types. The point of the question `What is a word?' is that we all know

that mismatches make the facts complex. The answer suggested here is

also somewhat complex, but I believe it is no more complex than the facts

demand.

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