The Word in Different Languages

The nature of word varies from language to language. For example, there is no equivalent in English to the Ukrainian рута-м’ята. It is one word in Ukrainian, but it would take many more words to translate it into English. Even then it would be a very descriptive translation: a plant in Ukrainian folklore which people have attributed different (mystical) properties to. It is often seen as a symbol of a girl’s young age. Even in cognate languages, seemingly similar words (ones with similar forms) may be far removed from each other semantically. The words zapomnieć in Polish and запомнить in Russian, which clearly go back to the same source, may be conceived as variations of the same word, but, in fact, they mean almost the exact opposite of each other.

In effect, the conception ‘word’ is determined afresh within the system of every language, and as a result the word-as-element-of-speech is language-specific, not language-universal. The various kinds of languages have their own broadly similar words, but even so there is variation from language to language inside a category, as we have seen with examples in the cognate languages Polish and Russian.

This necessarily brings us to the question of meaning.

The term meaning has been notoriously difficult to define as one of the most elusive concepts in linguistics. This is because when we attempt to define meaning, we need to cover a whole range of linguistic and extralinguistic factors that come into play at the same time. This is part of the reason why scholars are divided as to what constitutes meaning and the ways in which it should be described [Palmer, 1982: 9]. As far back as 1923, C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards in The Meaning of Meaning argued that the terms meaning and to mean cannot be interpreted and defined in a single way. To illustrate this, they listed at least 16 different interpretations of the verb mean. Interestingly enough, the more recent research reveals even more divergent approaches and terminologies used in the field.

Following Ogden and Richards, who maintained that ‘meaning is a relation in the mind between facts and events on the one hand and the symbols and words you use to refer to them, on the other’, Ullmann has gone further by using the term meaning to designate ‘a reciprocal relation between name and sense, which enables them to call up one another’ (Ullmann, 1964).

On the other hand, M. A. K. Halliday and J. R. Firth argue that meaning is a ‘function of the description at all levels’ or a ‘function in context’ respectively (Halliday, 1985).

Another problem that the meaning of a word poses is that different scholars attach varying significance to the inherent properties of the word, on the one hand, and contextual/functional/situational meanings, i.e. meanings that words acquire in various contexts. V.Vinogradov, for instance, contended that ‘the meaning of the word is about the socially recognized and established contexts of its use more than about anything else…’ (Vinogradov, 1953:6). Conversely, other scholars construe meaning as an indispensable inherent property of the word as the basic unit of language. Neither of the approaches, however, if applied to the exclusion of the other, can satisfactorily answer the question of meaning. Only if they are effectively reconciled can we expect to plausibly interpret the word’s meaning whether it is freestanding or used in context. Ullmann argued that if ‘words had no meaning outside contexts, it would be impossible to compile a dictionary…Single words have more or less permanent meanings, they actually do refer to certain referents, and not to others, and this characteristics is the indispensable basis of all communications’. He went on to say that each word has a hard core of meaning which is relatively stable and can only be modified by the context within certain limits’ (Ullmann, 1962). One should read this as proof that words cannot be used arbitrarily or acquire meaning only in context. From this perspective, the correlation between ‘meaning’ and ‘use’ acquires a new meaning, since ‘meaning-in-abstraction’ (fixed lexical meaning) has been shown to depend on ‘meaning-in-situation’ and vice versa (Leech, 1981: 341). This meaning vs. use dichotomy is conventionally discussed in terms of static vs. dynamic meanings in Western linguistic tradition. Dynamic or functional meaning cannot be interpreted without recourse to pragmatic analysis, whereby meaning is perceived as something that is performed rather than something that exists in a static way. In pragmatics, meaning is a result of interaction between the users of language, which is to say, it is ‘negotiated’ between speaker and hearer (Leech, 1981: 320). Here is how the opposition between static and dynamic meanings can sometimes be represented:

Intuitively, all speakers of a language know what a word means. They can single words out in utterances, recognize them, replace them with others. But as a term, word remains extremely vague and ambiguous. In view of this, D. Crystal in A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics suggests that the term ‘word’ be replaced by such terms as lexical item, lexical unit, or lexeme.

The term ‘word’ is used to designate an intermediate structure between a whole phrase and a single sound segment. All this while, we have been working on an assumption that words (just as well as phrases and sentences) are a total of meaning and form. In fact, in English, as in any other natural language, for that matter, which has a writing system, words have both a spoken form and a conventionally accepted written form. The reason why it is not easy to define the word is exactly because several different criteria come into the definition of the word, depending on whether the focus is on its representation, the thought it communicates (its meaning) or purely formal criteria.

The first type of definition relies heavily on writing traditions, and those are that we use spaces to separate sequences of letters and characters. Having said that, it should be noted that these traditions do not always correspond to functional realities. E.g., if we look at the phrase ‘a new Democratic party leader’ or ‘a useless waste paper basket’. The spaces between the words in these sequences do not have the same value. The words ‘democratic party’ and waste paper basket’ are a lot more closely linked than ‘new’ and ‘Democratic party’ or ‘useless’ and ‘waste paper basket’. The latter constitute semantic units, while the other words in these sequences do not. On the other hand, words written differently – state-of-the-art and statewide, for example – are similar in terms of a single unit of thought that they represent. The same goes for idiomatic and loose expressions: The silver earrings she was wearing were beautifully hand-crafted. More investment isn't a silver bullet for poor neighborhoods/There is no silver bullet for this problem. Consequently, a definition based on writing traditions alone cannot be entirely satisfactory.

The second type of definition takes the indivisible unit of thought as its frame of reference. The major problem that this view of the word has to overcome is that of ‘delimitation’, which offers three possible alternatives:

(a) the word as it is represented in writing represents a thought unit or a psychological unit. This is the most common case and the easiest to observe: chicken, chair, try, faith, intelligence.

(b) The word forms one block but includes two units of thought: spoonful, rethink, turnoff.

(c) A semantic unit exceeds the limit of the graphological unit and spreads over several words: the word is only a part of a more complex unit: to all intents and purposes, by all means, in flagrante, non sequitur.

And, finally, the third type of definition is based on purely formal criteria. One of the first scholars to suggest a formal definition of the word was L. Bloomfiled. He contrasted the word with other units: a morpheme, which is, following the Oxford Companion to the English Language, a minimal unit of form and meaning, and the syntagme (or structure), which consists potentially of more than one word. A morpheme as a minimal form may be either free or bound. A free morpheme is one which can stand on its own. Conversely, a form which does not occur alone is bound. E.g., like and think are free, whereas - able and re- in respectively likeable and rethink are bound. Hence, a word is construed as a form which can be freestanding and have meaning, but which cannot be broken down into elements that can all occur alone and also have meaning. Bloomfield’s analysis cannot be seen as satisfactory either, since it does not account for grammatical morphemes or compounds, for example.

It is important to make a distinction here between lexical and grammatical words. Most generally, the first class comprises full forms such as green, figure, badly etc., which is to say, forms of major parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs), the other class consists of ‘empty’ forms like the, of, to, and the like, which do not automatically suggest any identifiable meaning. These tend to be defined in terms of their syntactic function, rather than semantically. This distinction correlates with the distinction between open-class and closed-class word-forms, which has found its way into most modern schools of grammatical theory. It is easy to see why these classes are called what they are: the category of lexical words has thousands of nouns, to name just one, and new items are constantly added to the list. Grammatical words (prepositions, articles, conjunctions, forms indicating number, etc.), on the other hand, contain relatively few members and since the additions are rather rare, they are construed as closed sets. Other terms used to designate the category of ‘grammatical’ or ‘empty word-forms are ‘form words’, ‘function words’ or even ‘ structural words’. All these terms reflect the view that what we call empty word-forms differ grammatically and semantically from full word-forms. They are conventionally defined within the framework of Bloomfieldian and post-Bloomfieldian morpheme-based grammar on the basis of Bloomfield’s definition of the word as a minimal free form.

It must be noted that there does not seem to be a clear-cut distinction between the two classes. It might make better sense to speak of a continuum ranging from content words like conscience, dry, fine to words generally devoid of semantic content such as, for example, it or that in a sentence like ‘ It is apparent that this is not the case’. Besides, although many ‘empty’ words may be classed as grammatical words, they are not completely devoid of semantic content. The sentence ‘The house is on the river’ has quite a different meaning when ‘on’ is replaced by ‘by’ or ‘beyond’. By the same token, the coordinators ‘and’, ‘or’ or ‘but’ are not mutually interchangeable as they are not synonymous.