Word - Determining word boundaries

A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound. Word - Difficulty in defining the term. The precise definition of what a word is depends on which language the definition is for, and the dividing line between w ...

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• Word - Difficulty in defining the term
• Word - Words in different classes of languages
• Word - Complexity of word boundaries in speech
• Word - Determining word boundaries

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The precise definition of what a word is depends on which language the definition is for, and the dividing line between words and phrases is not always clear. In most writing systems, a word is usually marked out in the text by interword separation such as spaces or word dividers used in some languages such as Amharic. In other languages such as Chinese and Japanese, and in many ancient languages such as Sanskrit, word boundaries are not shown. Even in writing systems that use interword separation, word boundaries are not always clear ...

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Word, Word - Difficulty in defining the term, Word - Words in different classes of languages, Word - Complexity of word boundaries in speech, Word - Determining word boundaries

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In synthetic languages, a single word stem (for example, love) may have a number of different forms (for example, loves, loving, and loved). However, these are not usually considered to be different words, but different forms of the same word. In these languages, words may be considered to be constructed from a number of morphemes (such as love and -s). In polysynthetic languages, the number of morphemes per word can become so large that the word performs the same grammatical role as a phrase ...

See also:

Word, Word - Difficulty in defining the term, Word - Words in different classes of languages, Word - Complexity of word boundaries in speech, Word - Determining word boundaries

Read more here: » Word: Encyclopedia II - Word - Words in different classes of languages