What are words?
Today's word: genially
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Our word for today is “genially.” Later we’ll look at how Ralph Waldo Emerson used the word in an unusual way, when we explore the Oxford English Dictionary entry for what turns out to be an interesting history. But first we’ll use its structure and syntactic function as an example leading to a few things we can say about what a word is.
UNITS THAT MAY BE STRUCTURES
genially is an adverbial form of the adjective genial
-ly is a functional affix
The word may seem a little unusual in that its -ial morpheme (unit within a word) does not attach to a stand-alone free morpheme, so we're left wondering what a gen is. That we'll talk about in our exploration of the word's history.
Also, instead of adding an affix to a noun to make it adjectival, we add an affix to the adjective to make the "base" form into a noun—genial -ity.
MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURE:
BASE + ADJ +ADV gen-ial-ly
Here are other structures
SYLLABIC STRUCTURE:
gen-ial-lity (note the sound shared across syllables)
METRICAL STRUCTURE or CADENCE (emphasis):
gen i al
but, gen i al i ty
The tendency in English is to put the main emphasis on the first syllable of what we perceive to be the base morpheme, as in
in-trude, re-turn, epi-sode,
BUT
e-pi-scop-al
When we're not familiar with the meaning of a foreign prefix, here Greek epi, roughly meaning over or single, it's unstable. (apotheosis or apotheosis)
Why do foreigners talk so quickly?
Word boundaries
English speakers cannot "hear" the breaks between words in other languages, and vice-versa. We think we hear them in English, but acoustic instruments like non-speakers of a language don't register the boundaries as pauses. They are imposed by our knowledge of English.
How do words differ from phrases?
In his 1999 book Words and Rules, Stephen Pinker gives the classic linguistic definition of a word—a conventional pairing of sound and meaning—a look-up item not computed on the fly, an arbitrary sound-meaning linkage stored in long-term memory rather than an item constructed in working memory, such as a phrase, a sentence, or a paragraph. We'll use the term "lexeme" for look-up items as opposed to function-words and affixes.
Like everything in language, the definition is helpful but not absolute.
Are buy and bought a single look-up item? The morphological structure would be
buy and buy+ PAST
What happens when we put eat or teach into past-tense form? Is it the same as putting open or close into past tense?
Here is a word from Turkish, or is it several different lookup items?
eve: to a house |
ev (house) -e (to)
evden: from a house |
ev (house) -den (from)
evdžikden: from a little house |
ev (house) -džik(little)-den (from)
evdžiklerimizde: in our little houses |
ev (house) -džik(little)-ler(PL)-miz(our)-de (in)
What are the look-up items, and what are the constructions?
There are languages that make the Turkish example seem more like our own. as in this "word" from Mohawk:
washakotyya’tawitsherahetkvhta’se’
He made the thing that one puts on one's body ugly for her.
The technical terms involve language typology
analytic language<--------------------------------------------------->synthetic language
Mandarin English German Turkish Mohawk
Unlike Mohawk, the difficulties in Turkish don't seem to be that different in scale from English. We've got plenty of problems of our own. Think about "go" | "went" or "good" | "better" | "best". Each set involves different look-up items, even though they have the same meaning and in that sense are the same word—there are multiple lexemes, the linguistic label for a look-up item. Word-history—etymology—suggests some interesting things about these exceptions in English that we can talk about later (or now, if you want to).
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Understanding words and their meanings involves a different brain area than does working through syntax, the combination of words into well-formed phrases and sentences. Some people with aphasia, difficulty or inability to produce or understand language are able to understand speech but cannot form syntactic units (well-formed phrases and sentences). Others can speak but cannot understand language. There are two different areas that are most activated in producing and understanding—
Here's a map which shows where the word-meaning area (Wernicke's area) and the separate area for producing utterances (Broca's area) are located. Put simply (and somewhat crudely), look-up items activate Wernicke's Area while the combinatory activities of syntax activate Broca's area. Finding words or understanding them would seem to be simply matters of activation of separate areas.
QUESTIONS OR COMMENTS
Maybe enough definition of terms for the moment. Before we go to the subpage about our word for today, let's do our version of what the Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers did: look for uses of words that may help us think about the issues raised in our five questions about words. When you find a word that interests you, particularly if it appears in a passage you can quote or cite, send it to me at
with the subject line "Word".
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