Lexicology is the study of words, and while many readers will be new to the study of sounds or word segments, most of us feel that we know words very well. In fact, when we think about language, we tend to think about words. We often get asked, 'What's the word for stem collector?' or say, 'I just can't think of the right word.' As we have already seen, words are only one of the springs in language; a chain that has received too much attention in the past, and a chain that we have often been unable to study so thoroughly because of our knowledge and just as objectively as other aspects of language. First, we will try to say what the word is. Then we will consider word formation and word classes.
What do we mean by word?
Despite knowing the "word" well, it is not always easy to say what the word is. Some scholars have suggested that the word may occur in isolation. There is some validity to this statement, but would 'and' or 'we' or 'if' normally occur in isolation? They didn't want to, and yet we'd like to think of such items as words. Others have suggested that a word contains a single unit of meaning.
And we could create similar formulas for the second set. Looking at our patterns, it would be hard to say that the word "cow" contains only one unit of meaning.
A better approach to defining words is to recognize that there is no completely satisfactory definition. But that we can isolate four of the most commonly implied meanings of "words", an orthographic word; a morphological word; a lexical word, and a semantic word.
1) ORTHOGRAPHIC Word
A spelling word is a word that has a space on both sides. So we have fourteen spelling words in the previous sentence. However, this definition only applies to the written medium, as we rarely pause between words in ordinary speech. However, even in speech, it is possible to isolate words with pauses between them.
2) MORPHOLOGICAL Word
A morphological word is a unique shape. It considers only form, not meaning. For example, 'ball' is a single morphological word, although it can refer to both a bouncing object and 'dance'. "Balls" and "balls" would be two morphological words because they are not in the same form.
3) LEXICAL Word
A lexical word includes various forms of items that are closely related in meaning. So 'chair' and 'chairs' are two morphological words, but one lexical word. Similarly, "take", "takes", "taking", "took", and "taken" are five morphological words, but only one lexical word. Often in linguistics when a word is capitalized, for example TAKE, it means that we are dealing with a lexical word, so TAKE can take all the different forms, Example, 'take', 'takes', 'taking', 'took', and 'taken '.
4) SEMANTIC Word
A semantic word involves distinguishing between items that may be morphologically identical but differ in meaning. We saw above that "ball" can have two different meanings. This phenomenon of "polygamy" is common in English. So "table" can refer to a piece of furniture or to a diagram. Diagram and piece of furniture are the same morphological word, but they are two semantic words because they are not closely related in meaning.
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