Hi, I'm Taylor and welcome to Crash Course Linguistics!
According to the word count feature in a document, a word is a thing with spaces around it.
That’s a useful definition if we're just trying to figure out how long an essay should be, but it's not a very good guide to defining what “counts” as a word.
For example, "doghouse" is generally written without a space, while "rabbit hole" is written with one.
But they feel like they should both be words.
After all, sometimes people write "dog house" with the space, and we could totally start writing "rabbit-hole" or even "rabbithole" completely smushed together.
Also, just because a word like “hangry” isn’t in your dictionary doesn’t mean it’s not a word, or that I’m not feeling it right now.
Man, I should’ve eaten a snack before this shoot.
Anyway, today, we’re going to talk about how a linguist would answer the question,
“What even is a word?”
[THEME MUSIC]
To a linguist, the word "word" has a big meaning and a small meaning.
The big meaning of "word" is what we expect when we're looking something up in a dictionary.
We'd expect to find a dictionary entry for "rabbit hole" because this phrase has a meaning that we can't figure out from the definitions of its individual parts.
After looking up “rabbit” and “hole,” we wouldn't guess that “rabbit hole” means a place where a rabbit lives, or a complicated or absorbing situation
like finding yourself down a Wikipedia rabbit hole at 2am after Googling what languages are spoken on the International Space Station.
Its meaning is relatively unpredictable from its parts.
Dictionary-makers define one entry or unit as the largest unpredictable combinations of form and meaning.
They call each of these units lexemes or lexical items, because they're the parts of a lexicon, which is another word for dictionary.
In contrast, we wouldn't expect to find a dictionary entry for "deep hole" because if we look up “deep” and “hole,” we can figure out the meaning of the two combined.
It's predictable.
So "deep" and "hole" are both lexemes, while “deep hole” is not.
When we think about a phrase like "falling down rabbit holes", this is where the small meaning of “word” comes in.
Here, we can break the sentence into parts: fall, -ing, down, rabbit, hole, and -s — even though we don't say "ing" or "-s" by themselves, they have distinct meanings.
For example, -s indicates that there's more than one rabbit hole, and we can predict this from the meaning of "rabbit hole" and "-s" together.
But we can't separate "rabbit" into rabb and it, even though "it" is a word, because “rabb” doesn’t mean anything on its own.
"Rabb" and "it" don't each have their own meanings that they're contributing to "rabbit"
The meaning of "rabbit" is unpredictable.
Rabbit and -s are examples of the smallest unpredictable combinations of form and meaning.
Linguists call these units morphemes, and the study of them is morphology.
That's morph as in “metamorphosis” or “Animorphs.”
It’s from a Greek word meaning shape or form, because morphemes can stick to each other to change the shape of a word.
One reason it’s helpful to divide language into morphemes is because it helps us see patterns across languages.
A separate word in one language might be a part of a word in another language.
For example, the phrase “I washed my feet” is a sentence with several words in Mandarin.
The same idea is a single word with many morphemes in Murrinhpatha and lots of other Australian languages.
If we just think of words, rather than the morphemes that build words, we miss this and a lot of other interesting potential patterns.
If we look at morphemes instead, we can see differences and similarities between languages in the information they convey, not just the number of words they use!
There are a couple different kinds of relationships that morphemes can have with each other.