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What is WORD? You may wonder whether this question is worth answering, because everyone of us can identify words without much effort due to our everyday language experience and our language intuition. Words, like bricks used in building houses, are ready-made units for building sentences. They are perhaps the most accessible linguistic units to language users. However, identifying words is one thing, defining words is totally another matter. Even the most experienced linguist finds it hard to give a clear-cut and universal definition of word that applies to all languages in the world. In what follows, we will not attempt to give a universal and all-embracing definition of word but to summon up the most common and characteristic features of word.
Word is made up of sounds or letters. But word is totally different from sounds or letters. Word is meaningful whereas sounds or letters are meaningless. For example, the English article a is meaningful in that it can be used to mean indefiniteness when modifying nouns. The letter a is, however, meaningless. It can only be used as an element in building words.
This can be understood in two ways. First of all, word in itself possesses some grammatical features. For example, the word book is a noun and a countable noun. The word take is a verb and a transitive verb. Then, word is the basic structural unit of a language. It can enter a sentence and possess a structural position in the sentence, thus obtaining some structural meaning. For instance, in the sentence He is an engineer, the word He is not merely a pronoun, it is also the subject of the sentence. In language, sentence is the biggest structural unit, and word is the basic structural unit, basic in the sense that it is the smallest free unit which enters higher structural levels such as phrase, clause, and sentence.
In English, "un-" is meaningful, but it cannot be used independently. "-ed" is a grammatical unit, but it must be attached to the end of a verb when it is used. In modern Chinese, the character“习”can only be used with the combination of some other characters, such as“习惯，习以为常，温习，实习”. So both “un-, -ed, 习”are not regarded as words. Word can appear by itself.
Compared with other linguistic units such as phrase, clause, and sentence, Word is the most stable linguistic unit, in respect of its internal structure, that is, the constituent parts of a complex word have little potential for rearrangement, compared with the relative positional mobility of the constituents of a sentence. Take the word chairman for example. If the two components chair and man are rearranged as * manchair, it is an unacceptable word in English.
By UNINTERRUPTIBILITY, we mean new elements are not to be inserted into a word even when there are several parts in a word. Nothing is to be inserted in between the three parts of the word disappointment: dis ＋ appoint ＋ ment. Nor is one allowed to use pauses between the parts of a word ( * dis appoint ment). In contrast, one could add Jane in the coordinating subject of the following sentence.
Paul, (Jane) and Rebecca are my classmates.
In an extreme case, one could insert the adverb "even" between any two parts in the following sentence.
(Even) Paul (even) didn't (even) love (even) Jane (even).