The english word. The size-of-unit problem.

Any language is peculiar and semiological system. In the written form of a language the flow of speech is neatly divided.

In oral speech we do not make pauses after every word words get fused together. Some lexical items become small and even disappear altogether. The problem is how do we know what the word is (the boundaries, the separability of a word)- the size- of- unit problem.

This problems the singling out of words in speech.

1. Is the article a word in the some sense as a noun?

2. Hyphes- is a merry-go- round

3. Compounds- classmates?

4. Abbreviations MPs- one word or two?

The segmentation of the flow of speech into words can be achieved if speech is investigated as 3 levels:

1. the feature level

2. semantic level

3. metasemiotic level

The feature level; in every language there are typical combinations of sounds which occur on word boundaries.

The study of the phoneme clusters is called phonotactic.

Vowels- never clusters

Consonants- clusters

- prevocalic splash

- postvocalic checked, means

- intervocalic

There are some consonants that never cluster:

spw, kf, chm

The rules of phonotactics can be applied to find the word boundaries.

The semantic level; we deal with syntactic prosody which serves to express syntactic relation between the utterances.

Pauses are used to identity meaningful bits of information.

On the first floor// there is a nursery

The metasemiotic level: speech become rather expressive, separate words give them special emphasise to make them sound more important.

We are friends. Are we not?

We should analyse the relationship between language units (phonemes, morphemes, words)

All this help to find boundaries.

The division of flow of speech into words is closely connected with syllable division. The singling out of words depends on syllable stereotype of a given language. Type of word stress is also very important.

From the point of view of lexicologyst there are 3 types of word stress in English:

1.Unifying: music, future

2. 2.Primary (secondary: gravitation, cooperation, melodrama)

3. 3.Even (ровное): broad- minded, blue-eyed

These factors help us to find the word boundaries.

English is an analytical language. It tends to bring it’s units into complexes, rather than use morphological combination, which is typical of synthetic of flexion languages (Russian, French, German)

This tendency is obvious in isolating language, where all words are invariable and syntactic relationships between them are shown by word order.

English in it’s development goes into direction of isolating lang-s.

At the lexical level there are lot’s of multistructural units, which functioning as a single word.

Multistructural units.

1. Loose compounds (свободн.сложение слова)

• stone wall

• speech sound

The categorial nature of the first component here is vague (неясная)

If we treat it as an adjective formed by means of conversion from the noun the whole complex- word combination, both elements are combinated.

If 1-st component is a noun  the whole complex- a compound word, because two nouns in common case by means of prep.of conjunction.

Unstable compounds (sometimes) they may turn into real word combination.

haircut

busdriver

There are usually pronounce with a strong unifying stress.

If we compare: blood pressure with haircut

picture gallery

they carry two stresses they are regarded as word combinations.

Much depends on their nomination as well, when 2 elements of these two compounds express a complex notion and are “rolled into one whole” and become a single word.

black board – blackboard

green house- greenhouse (теплица)

Being an analytical language English has a number of features:

1. the word order is fixed, used as means of express of grammatical category.

2. Prosady becomes an organizing factor in constructing speech.

3. The number of inflections is reduced, because there is no morphological in case and gender.

Loose compounds manifest these features most clearly.

The nature of loose compounds is motivated by word order and prosady, they are pronounced with unifying stress and without pauses.

2. String compounds- complexes of the parts of speech type (слож. сложного синтаксического типа)

• merry-go-round

• “don’t- tell- me- where – to- put- my- socks” look (взгляд)

• forget- me- not

They have no direct equivalent in Russian.

lamp-shade (абажур)

highway (шоссе)

flower bed (клумба)

Sometimes the translation easy, sometimes difficult

-red-haired (рыжеволосый) -bald –headed (лысый)

They are not distinguished from the traditional words.

Such syntactic words are a powerful stylistic device.

It was dark- ground- freezing- pre- Thanksgiving weather.

At 1-st sight, the word appears to be the easiest thing to define, however it still presents much arguing, but all the scholars the word is the basic unit of the vocabulary, the highest unit of the morphology, because it consists of morphemes and the lowest unit of syntax ( it serves building material for word combinations).