A Linguistic Introduction to English Words - Article Example

Words are used in a language to pass ideas from one person to another by coding a concept one thinks of in a word for this concept which is previously settled with other language speakers. The process is called “the encryption system”, is automatic, and goes into the next steps: thinking of an idea (made by one human) – coding – passing – decoding (made by another human) – thinking of an idea too. The system doesn’t work without rules on combining words together, without syntax. Meanings united in a random way fail to transmit an idea. For example:

Coming back to a word, it’s a “minimum meaningful unit” called “listeme”, which includes next cases: (1) words made of two and more words, but conveying a single meaning like “homeowner”, “cannot” and etc. (2) words with indexes (like affixes and etc.) which may change words’ meanings. For example dog – dogs (Harley, 2004). (3) Unions of words or idioms, which only have a meaning within a particular construction. For example, “spin and span” cannot always be used for the “clean” concept.

Considering all the above said, the word is:

• a phonological word (how it pronounced),
• meaning of a word (semantic),
• category of a word (syntax),
• and morphology (other forms of a word).

The lexicon is “a set of basic units (words)” concentrated with meanings (Curse, 2008). “Lexemes” are word forms with their related meanings (illustrative examples are words in dictionaries).

While graphic words have spaces, spoken language uses stresses or regular word positions and etc. to separate one word from another. Within sentences, words are recognized as the largest interpretable (respecting words boundaries and structure of a sentence) forms. When expressing ideas or concepts which have no single settled meanings, the speaker builds semantic chains to express them. For example, to convey “drink chilled wine” the chain would be “chilled” with “wine” in a single concept, then “chilled wine” with “drink” (Cruse, 2008).

Lexical structures (meaning of words within linguistics). There’re debates on either word meaning’s in relation with other words (like “dog” is a dog because it’s not a cat) and “holists” believe that, or words are self-contained due to describable meanings (“boy” is a human, male, and young) (Cruse, 2008). Some words are ambiguous, and their meanings are known from context.