By desmond bett; B. A- criminology m. A – public administration & policy

2.2
WORDS ARE LIKE LIQUORICE ALLSORTS
When we talk of words we do not always mean exactly the same thing. Like liquorice allsorts, words come in all sorts of varieties. We will start our discussions by distinguishing the different senses in which we use the term ‘word’.

2.2.1
Word-forms
Let us use the term WORD-FORM to describe the physical form which realizes or represents a word in speech or writing. Consider the words in the following extract from T.S.Eliot’s poem:
[2.1]
Half-past one,
The street-lamp sputter,
The street-lamp muttered,
The street-lamp said, ‘Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin…
(‘Rhapsody on a windy night’ in Eliot 1963

In written English, words are easy to recognize. They are preceded by a space and followed by a space. Using this criterion, we can say that there are thirty-one words (i.e. word-forms) in the extract from ‘Rhapsody’. We will call word-forms like these which we find in writing ORTHOGRAPHIC WORDS. If you look again at the extract, you might wonder if some of the hyphenated orthographic words are ‘really’ individual words. Many people would be hyphenated half-past as Eliot does but not street-lamp. They would write street lamp as two separate words, with a space between them. What would you do?

The use of hyphens to indicate that something is a complex word containing more than one word-like unit is variable, largely depending on how transparent the compound nature of a word is. Shakespeare wrote today as to-day and tomorrow as to-morrow:

[2.2]
a. To-morrow, Caesar,

I shall be furnished to inform you rightly…
(Antony and Cleopatra, I, IV)
b. O! That we know had here
But ten thousand of those men in England
That do not work to-day.
(Henry V.IV,iii)
Hyphenating to-day and to-morrow is less common now, probably because most speakers are unaware of the compound nature of these words. Today comes from Old English t dae ‘to+day’ and tomorrow is from Middle English to mor(e) we (i.e. to (the)morrow –to- can be traced back ultimately to a form that is meant ‘this’ in Indo-European. Note is passing that three major periods are distinguished in the history of the English language: Old English (conventionally abbreviated as OE) was spoken c.450-1100; Middle English (conventionally abbreviated as ME) was spoken c. 1100-1500 to the present.
Generally, the use of the hyphen in such words that are no longer seen as compounds is in decline. The hyphen tends to be mostly used in compounds that are regarded as fairly new words. Many well-established words that are transparently compounded e.g. schoolboy, are normally written without a hyphen. Of course, judgments as to what is an established word vary greatly. There are few firm rules here. For instance, in the OED both seaway and sea-way are shown to be accepted ways of writing the word pronounced as / si:weI/. Similarly, the compilers of the OED show variation in the way they enter both hyphenated first-rate and first rate written as two words separated by a space.
Interestingly, hyphenation is also used creatively to indicate that an idea that would normally be expressed by a phase is being treated as a single word fir communicative purposes because it has crystallized in the writer’s mind into a firm single concept. Thus, for example, the expression simple to serve is a normal phrase, just like easy to control. But it can also be used as hyphenated word as in simple-to-serve recipe dishes (M&S Magazine 1992:9). Similarly, on page 48 of the same magazine, the writer of an advertising feature uses the phrase fresh from the farm’ as a hyphenated word in ‘fresh-from-the –farm-eggs’. But for creative hyphenation you are unlikely to find anything more striking than this:
[2.3]
On pitcaim there is little evidence of the what-we-have-wehold, no-surrender, the Queen’s-picture-in-every-room sort of attitude.
Simon Winchester in The Guardian magazine, 12 June 1993: 27; (italics added to highlight the compounds)
What we have established is that as a rule, orthographic words have a space on either side of them. But there are cases where this simple rule of thumb is not followed. There is a degree of flexibility in the way in which words are written down: being, or not being, separated by a space is in itself not a sure sign of word status. Some orthographic words which are uncontroversially written as one unit contain two words within them. They are compound words like firstrate, seaway, wheelbarrow and teapot. Furthermore, there are forms like they’re, hadn’t, and I’m which are joined together in writing yet which are not compound words. When you scratch the skin, you see immediately that they’re, hadn’t, and I’m are really versions of the pairs of words they are, had not, and I am. Our theory needs to say something about awkward customers like these. Since the issues they raise are complex, we will postpone discussion of them until section (4.3) and (8.3). Finally, there are words which are compounded (and maybe hyphenated as in [2.3]) as a one-off to crystallize a particular meaning. So far we have only considered orthographic words, i.e. recognizable physical written word-forms. Obviously, words are physical objects exists not only in writing, but also in speech. We will now briefly turn to word-forms in spoken language. We will refer to them as PHONOLOGICAL WORDS.
The challenge of word recognition arises in an event more obvious way when we consider speech. Words are not separated distinctly from each other. We do not leave a pause between words that could be equated to a space in writing. (If we did that, conversation would be painfully slow! Just try speaking to one of your friends today leaving a two-second gap between words. See how they react.) In a normal speech words come out in a torrent. They overlap. Just as droplets of water cannot be seen flowing down a river, individual words do not stand out discretely in the flow of conversation. So they are much harder to isolate than words in writing. None the less, we are able to isolate them. If you had an utterance like:
[2.4]
The cat slept in your bed.
/ekaet slept in: bed/
(Note: ‘’’ shows that the following syllable is stressed; phonemic transcription is written between slant lines.)
You would be able to recognize the six phonological words that have been written in PHONEMIC TRANSCRIPTION (which shows the PHONEMES, i.e. the sounds that are used to distinguish the meanings of words) although what you hear is one continuous stream of sound. For purely practical reasons, throughout the book, unless otherwise stated, phonemic transcriptions and references to pronunciation will be based on RECEIVED PRONUNCIATION (RP), the precise accent of standard British English-the variety popularly known as the Queen’s English or BBC English.
An intriguing question that linguists and psychologists have tried to answer is: how do people recognize words in speech? We will address this question in detail in section (11.2.1) below. For now let us simply assume that phonological words can be identified. Our present task will simply be to outline some of their key properties. To do this it will be useful to distinguish between two types of words: the so-called CONTENT WORDS and FUNCTION WORDS. Content words are the nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs which contain most of the REFERENTIAL (or COGNITIVE MEANING) of a sentence. This roughly means that they name individuals and predicate on them certain properties. They tell us, for instance, what happened or who did what to whom, and in what circumstances. An example will make the point clear. In the old days, when people sent telegrams, it was content words that were mainly (or exclusively) used. A proud parent could send a message like baby girl arrived yesterday which contain two nouns, a verb and an adverb. Obviously, this is not a well-formed, grammatical sentence. But its meanings would be clear enough.
Function words are the rest-prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, articles and so on. They have a pronominally grammatical role. A telegram containing only the words she it and for us would convey little idea of what the intended interpretation was. This is not to say that function words are superfluous. Without them sentences are usually ungrammatical. A sentence like *Nelly went town which lacks the preposition to is not permitted. We have to say Nelly went to town.
In English, content words have this property: one of their syllables is more prominent than the rest because it receives MAIN STRESS. This is seen in the words below where the syllable with main stress preceded by’’’
[2.5]