Words

The notion of  ‘word’ is complex, and so it is useful to identify a number of slightly different senses of ‘word’:

• Orthographic words: these are the words that we are familiar with in written language, where they are separated by spaces.  For example, They wrote us a letter contains 5 distinct orthographic words.
• Grammatical words: A word falls into one grammatical word class (or ‘part of speech’) or another. Thus the orthographic word leaves can be either of two grammatical words: a verb (the present tense -s form of leave) or a noun (the plural of leaf).
• Lexemes: this is a set of grammatical words which share the same basic meaning, similar forms, and the same word class. For example, leave, leaves, left and leaving are all members of the verb lexeme leave. this is the meaning of ‘word’ that is employed in dictionaries.

Major families of words

A Lexical words

• Lexical words are the main carriers of information in a text or speech act.
• They can be subdivided into the following word classes (or parts of speech): nouns, lexical verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.
• Of all the word families, lexical words are the most numerous, and their number is growing all the time. In other words, they are members of open classes.
• They often have a complex internal structure and can be composed of several parts: e.g. unfriendliness = un+friend+li+ness.
• Lexical words can be heads of phrases: e.g. the noun completion is the head (or main word) of the noun phrase the completion of the task.
• They are generally the words that are stressed most in speech.
• They are generally the words that remain if  a sentence is compressed in a newspaper headline.

B Function words

• Function words can be categorized in terms of word classes such as prepositions, coordinators, auxiliary verbs and pronouns.
• They usually indicate meaning relationships and help us to interpret units containing lexical words, by showing how the units are related to each other.
• Function words belong to closed classes, which have a very limited and fixed membership. For example, English had only four coordinators: and, or, but, and (rarely) nor.
• Individual function words tend to occur frequently, and in almost any type of text.

C  Inserts

• Inserts are found mainly in spoken language.
• Inserts do not form an integral part of a syntactic structure, but tend to be inserted freely in a text.
• They are often marked off by a break in intonation in speech, or by a punctuation mark in writing: e.g. Well, we made it.
• They generally carry emotional and discoursal meanings, such as oh, ah, wow, used to express a speaker’s emotional response to a situation, or yeah, no, okay, used to signal a response to what has just been said.
• Inserts are generally simple in form, though they often have an atypical pronunciation (e.g. hm, uh-huh, ugh, yeah). Examples are: Hm hm, very good (conv), Yeah, I will. Bye. (conv), Cheers man. (conv)