Words and Their Meaning

Howard Jackson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317887560
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Lingüística

In this book, the development of the English dictionary is examined, along with the kinds of dictionary available, the range of information they contain, factors affecting their usage, and public attitudes towards them. As well as an descriptive analysis of word meaning, the author considers whether a thematic, thesaurus-like presentation might be more suited than the traditional alphabetical format to the description of words and their meaning.

CHAPTER 1

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What is a Word?

This book is about words and their meanings. Before we begin to discuss meanings, we need to be clear what we understand by the term word. It is an ambiguous term and we use it in many ways, even in ordinary language. If we want to use it as a term in the description of language, we must be sure what we mean by it. To illustrate what I mean by saying that the term ‘word’ is ambiguous, let me ask you to count the words in the following sentence:

[1] You can't tie a bow with the rope in the bow of a boat.

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Probably the most straightforward answer to the question is to say that there are fourteen words in [1]. There are thirteen spaces between the items, and, in writing at least, a word is often regarded as an item bounded by spaces. But the item can't is a problem under such a definition, since it is in a sense a coalescence of two ‘words’, can and not: part of the abbreviation is recognised in writing by the apostrophe. If we regard can't as two words written together (can not) and abbreviated, our total now comes to fifteen.

But some of the words occur more than once: a and the, for example. Are a before bow and a before boat to be regarded as (two instances of) the ‘same’ word and therefore only counted once? Or are they two words, as our counting has so far assumed? And if the two occurrences of a and the are to be counted as single instances of these words (giving us a total now of thirteen words), what are we to say about the two occurrences of bow? As far as the marks on the page (the writing) are concerned, we are dealing with the same sequence of letters: b + o + w. Orthographically, therefore, the two occurrences of bow constitute a single word (bringing our total now to twelve). The orthographic perspective taken by itself, of course, ignores the meaning of the words, and as soon as we invoke meanings we are talking about different words bow.

What I hope to have shown is that the answer to the apparently simple instruction, ‘Count the words in the following sentence’, is not simple. You first of all have to ask: ‘What do you mean by “word”?’ In this chapter we are going to investigate some of the distinctions that need to be made in order to interpret the term ‘word’ in any particular context.

Written and spoken words

Field linguists investigating a language that does not have a written form often have a problem in deciding where the boundaries between words occur in speech. Written languages have institutionalised word boundaries by means of the orthographic space between words, though, as we shall see, orthographic practice is not always a good reflec-tion of grammar and meaning. And even orthographically there is the occasional difficult case, like can't in [1]. To illustrate this point, write an orthographic version of the following representation of English speech, which reflects the fact that there are no ‘spaces’ between words in speech and that we run words together when we speak:

[2] isediwannidapynamilk.

For those of you familiar with the symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet (see Knowles, 1987), this would be:

[2a] /ɪ sƐdɪwɒnɪdǝpaɪnǝmɪlk/.

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The orthographic version of this is:

[2b] He said he wanted a pint of milk.

But if we did not already have the well established conventions of English orthography, we should have difficulty in deciding, for example, whether apynamilk should constitute one word or two, or three or four. In practice, field linguists use a variety of criteria from several linguistic levels -phonological (the level of sounds and their combination), morphological (the level of word structure), semantic (the level of meaning), syntactic (the level of sentence structure) – to decide on word boundaries in languages that they are ‘reducing to writing’.

In English, the question of word boundaries in writing still exists in a few cases, especially in how we write compound words. Compounds are words that form a unit made up of two or more single words. e.g. time + keeper, time + lag, time + sharing. Write down how you would write these combinations.

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Nearly all English users would probably write time + keeper as timekeeper. There may, however, be a difference of opinion with time + lag. The possibilities are: timelag, time-lag, time lag. Collins English Dictionary (1979), for example, has time-lag, while Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary has time lag. And for time + sharing the single unhyphenated orthographic word is probably not found, so that the possibilities are: time-sharing and time sharing. Check in any dictionaries available to you on how the dictionary recommends that these compounds should be written. In the course of their acceptance into the language as single words, many compounds undergo a development from being written as two words, through being hyphenated, to being written as a single word.

Assuming that we agree, as we do for most words in English, how we should relate spoken and written forms, there still remains for a number of words some confusion between writing and speech. One source of confusion is where a written word may be pronounced in more than one way (by the same speaker!). We have already noted in [1] that bow may be pronounced either /bɑʊ/ and refer to part of a boat, or /bəʊ/ and refer to the result of tying string or a ribbon in a particular way. What are the two different pronunciations and meanings of sow and refuse?

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The same differences of pronunciation apply to sow as to bow: pronounced /sɑʊ/, sow refers to a female pig; pronounced /səʊ/, it refers to the activity of putting seeds into the ground. When refuse is pronounced/rɪ'fju:z/ it refers to the action of declining or resisting (i.e. it is a verb); pronounced/'rɛfju:s/, it refers to rubbish (i.e. it is a noun).

A more frequent confusion than that of different pronunciations for the same spelling is the reverse: different spellings for the same pronunciation. Look at the following pairs and determine the different meanings of each member of the pair:

[3]	feet	–	feat
	lesson	–	lessen
	fete	–	fate
	practice	–	practise.

You can check the meanings of these items by looking them up in a dictionary.

A particular spelling which has two pronunciations with different meanings represents two different words: there are two words bow, and you will find that dictionaries give them separate entries. (We are discounting differences of accent or variation in the pronunciation of words like either.) Similarly, a particular pronunciation that has two spellings with different meanings (and we discount variant spellings of words like medieval/mediaeval) represents two different words: this is easier to accept, since they are in any case separate headwords in the dictionary, given that the dictionary is based on spelling.

Words which are spelt the same, but have different pronunciations and meanings, are called homographs, e.g. bow. Words which are pronounced the same, but have different spellings and meanings, are called homophones, e.g. feet/feat. Additionally, there are many cases where a single spelling and pronunciation occurs with more than one meaning, e.g. bank. There are several different ‘words’ – in terms of items with separate meanings – which are spelt bank and pronounced /bæŋk/ in English, e.g.

[4]	bank 1	–	financial institution
	bank 2	–	side of river or stream
	bank 3	–	a row of keys on a keyboard.

Words like bank, which are spelt and pronounced the same, but have clearly different meanings, are called homonyms.

Now consider the following words and say which of them you think are homonyms:

[5]...