Language can be divided up into pieces at a variety of sizes, ranging from sounds up to utterances and even to documents .-We think of words as the basic units of language. Babies

start speaking by eliciting his first word (e.g.“"Mamaaaa!" ). Sentences come later. In this sense words seem to be the building-blocks of language.

Are you going to call me what?

- A classification of English words according to meaning is a thesaurus. But the kind of conventional classification is a dictionary, in which words are listed according to their spelling in alphabetical order.

A word is a building-block with a meaning that is unpredictable that learners of English, and even native speakers, may need to consult a dictionary in order to discover it. So words are units of language that have two characteristics:

are the building-blocks

that are unpredictable and so must be listed in DICTIONARIES

out of which phrases and sentences are formed

have meanings

A word token is an individual occurrence of a word in a concrete context. It is something which exists in time and space.

A word type is a “dictionary entry” for a word. It is somewhat abstract; it’s what we’re talking about when we say that we know the meaning of the word skillful, or when we say that the words continue and go on are synonyms.

Ex. (1) Mary does her homework but her brother doesn’t.

If we take as a guide the English spelling convention of placing a space between each word, the answer seems clearly to be eight.

But there is also a sense in which there are fewer than eight words in the sentence, because one of them (her) is repeated. In this sense, the third word is the same as the sixth, so there are only seven words in the sentence. Due to that, the third and the six at (1) are distinct tokens of a single type.

Words with predictable meanings work out on the basis of the sound or combinatinon of sounds.

This issue can be divided into three types:Quack, quack!

a) Onomatopoeic words: These are words whose sound seem to reflect

their meaning fairly directly. Words that animals make.

Examples:Oink!

Miaow!

b) Words with recognizable parts:

These words are composed of independently identifiable parts which their meaning of the parts is sufficient to determine the meaning of the whole word.

Examples:* Unforgetable : Un (negative prefix) + forget (root) + able (suffix)

* Hydromassage Hydro (root) + massage (root)

c) Invented words : These are words that no-one has ever used

before.

Example: Un-clintonish

(Un-clintonish it is perfectly understandable even though the base from which it is formed is a proper name (Clinton) and hence will not be listened in most dictionaries).

Some things that are larger than a word (two or more).

They have meaning that is not entirely predictable from the meanings of the words that compose it.

There are three types of non-words:

1. IDIOMSTwo or more words that function as a single unit semantically.

Examples:a) I keep notes on all my expenditure. “I wrote down a record of eveything I spend”

b) I keep tabs on all my expenditure.“I attached small flaps to all the notes and coins that I spend? Or“I tear off sma pieces from the paper money that I spend and keep them”

• take a shine to become attracted to• raise Cain create a disturbance• have a chip on one`s shoulder be resentful• kick the bucket die• red herring irrelevant argument• white elephant unwanted object• dark horse competitor whose

strength is unknown• Aunt Sally target of mockery

2. COLLOCATIONS An expression consisting of two or more words that

correspond to some conventional way of saying things.

Examples: White wine yellow

White coffee brown (with milk)

White noisecontaining many frequencies with about equal amplitude.

White man belonging to an ethnic group whose members’ skin colour is typically pinkish or pale brown.

3. PROVERB Is a traditional saying, syntactically a sentence, whose

conventional interpretation differs from what is suggested by the literal meaning of the words it contains.

Examples: “Too many cooks spoil the broth”

(Having too many people involved in a task makes it harder to complete).

“A stitch in time saves nine”(Anticipating a future problem and taking care to avoid it is less troublesome in the long run than responding to the problem after it has arisen).

“It`s no use crying over spilt milk”(After an accident one should look to the future, rather than waste time wishing the accident had no happened).

According to the author Andrew Carstairs – Mc Carthy’s point of view, he considers that:

1° Words are building-blocks for constructing words and phrases.

2° Words considered as tokens are not listed on a dictionary entries, but words as types are.

3° Words with predictable meanings: words whose meanings are predictable on the basis of their forms and are derived from known words following some precise morphological rules.

Ex. A) Dog dogs B) Onomatopoeic words sounds rather than

letters.

4º Words with unpredictable meanings: the ones which cannot be defined as a word. However, they still have an unpredictable relationship with their meanings. They are non-words (idioms, collocations, and proverbs), entities that are larger than a word with unpredictable meanings. Most of them are listed in a dictionary. Many of the lexical items that are phrases or sentences (idioms or proverbs) have meanings which can be seen as metaphorical extensions of a literal meaning.

Ex. Proverb: Out of side, out of mind.

(If you don’t see something, you are not going to think of it.)

Idioms: Who has eaten of the pot knows the taste of the broth. Collocation: Fast food a quick shower take an exam

5° LEXICAL ITEM, the same as LEXEME? Although lexeme and lexical item are often used

interchangeably, distinctions can be made. Lexical item is the more general term and

lexeme is reserved for the “word” which has a group of variants ( e.g. Go, went, gone.)

A lexical item … may contain more than one lexemes or word: these are idioms such as bury the hatchet that means ‘to stop fighting or arguing’.

 A lexical item may also be the term for a word, words, or a phrase whose meaning is not deducible from the meaning of its parts. e.g. greenhouse, bucket shop

 A lexical item may also be used to mean a word form, such as an irregular inflectional form (of a lexeme) that would be expected to have a separate dictionary entry.

For example, a dictionary, in addition to listing buy, might have an entry ‘bought: see buy’. Bought would therefore be a separate lexical item.

CARSTAIRS -MC CARTHY , Andrew (2002) An Introduction to English Morphology: Words and Their Structure . Great Britain. Oxford University Press. Edinburgh University Press, 150 pages

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/types-tokens

GROUP “2”

Participants: Colunche Ramos Bilma Kahn Murillo Jackelyn Lozano Pérez Ana Lucía Maita Véliz Gloria

Milagros