For example, if someone tells you, “I need you to walk the dog,” it’s not grammatical to answer “-ed” to indicate that you already walked the dog. This –ed unit appears consistently in this form and consistently has this meaning, but it never appears in isolation: it’s always attached at the end of a word. We can easily think of several other examples where that form has that meaning, like walked, baked, cleaned, kicked, kissed. That little bit that’s spelled –ed (and pronounced a few different ways depending on the environment) has a consistent meaning in English: past tense. And the word carrots is made up of carrot plus a bit that tells us that there’s more than one carrot. The word cooked is made up of the word cook plus another small form that tells us that the cooking happened in the past. But there are more than four units of meaning in the sentence. We can make the observations we just discussed above to check for isolation, moveability, and inseparability to provide evidence that each of Penny, cooked, some, and carrots is a word. ![]() It’s quite straightforward to say that this sentence has four words in it. (This means that some words are also morphemes.) But some morphemes can only ever appear when they’re attached to something else these are called bound morphemes. A morpheme is the smallest form that has meaning. Some morphemes are free: they can appear in isolation. ![]() But you’ve probably already noticed that there are other forms that have meaning and some of them seem to be smaller than whole words. So we’ve seen that a word is a free form that has a meaning. And because it’s a single word, it’s inseparable, so we can’t add anything else into the middle of it. It’s not that a plural -s can’t go on the end of the word vegetable it’s that the word vegetable peeler is a single word (even though we spell it with a space between the two parts of it). That’s fine, but it’s totally impossible to say:Įven though she probably uses the peeler to peel multiple vegetables. This might seem like a trivial observation – of course, you can’t break words up into bits! – but if we look at a word that’s a little more complex than carrots we see that it’s an important insight. But that bit of information can’t go just anywhere: it can’t interrupt the word carrot: The word carrot has a bit of information added to the end of it to show that there’s more than one carrot. The other important observation we can make about words is that they’re inseparable: We can’t break them up by putting other pieces inside them. The word soup can appear as the last word in a sentence, as the first word, or in the middle of a sentence. I love to eat soup when it’s cold outside. Here are some examples:Įach of those single words is perfectly grammatical standing in isolation as the answer to a question.Īnother reason we say that words are free is that they’re moveable: they can occupy a whole variety of different positions in a sentence. ![]() In ordinary conversation, we don’t often utter just a single word, but there are plenty of contexts in which a single word is indeed an entire utterance. ![]() What does it mean for a word to be free? One observation that leads us to say that words are free is that they can appear in isolation, on their own. Linguists have also noticed that words behave in a way that other elements of mental grammar don’t because words are free. The other side of the coin is the meaning of the word: the image or concept we have in our mind when we use the word. So a word is something that links a given form with a given meaning. One side of this metaphorical coin is the form of a word: the sounds (or letters) that combine to make the spoken or written word. A famous linguist named Ferdinand de Saussure said that a word is like a coin because it has two sides to it that can never be separated. What’s a word? It seems almost silly to ask such a simple question, but if you think about it, the question doesn’t have an obvious answer.
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