
Contents
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1 Introduction 1 Introduction
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2 Identifying words 2 Identifying words
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3 Approaches to ‘the word’ 3 Approaches to ‘the word’
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4 Word as prototype 4 Word as prototype
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5 Are these words? 5 Are these words?
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6 Exhaustive analysis, no residues 6 Exhaustive analysis, no residues
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7 Overview of the volume 7 Overview of the volume
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Introduction
Get accessJohn R Taylor (PhD 1979) is senior lecturer in linguistics at the University of Otago, New Zealand; previously he was at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and the University of Trier, Germany. His interest in Cognitive Linguistics dates from the 1980s, when, after having completed his doctoral thesis on acoustic phonetics, he chanced upon a preprint of some chapters of Langacker's Foundations of Cognitive Grammar. He is author of Linguistic Categorization (1989; 2nd ed., 1995; 3rd rev. ed., 2003; and translated into Japanese, Korean, Italian, and Polish), Possessives in English (1996), and Cognitive Grammar (which appeared in 2003 in the Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics series). He has also coedited two volumes: Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World (with Robert MacLaury, 1996) and Current Approaches to Lexical Semantics (with Hubert Cuyckens and René Dirven, 2003). Since 1996, he has been one of the editors (alongside Ronald Langacker and René Dirven) of the series Cognitive Linguistics Research, published by Mouton de Gruyter. His main research interests are lexical semantics, the syntax-semantics interface, and phonetics/phonology in a Cognitive Linguistics perspective. John R Taylor can be reached at [email protected].
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Published:07 April 2015
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Abstract
Although words are arguably the most basic of all linguistic units, and the ones which speakers of a language are most likely to be aware of and to talk about, the definition of ‘word’ is fraught with difficulties. Partly, this has to do with the ambiguity of the term itself; ‘word’ can refer to a word form, a word token, a word type, or a lexeme. In addition, the various criteria for identifying words—orthographic, phonological, semantic, syntactic—do not always converge on a unique analysis, thus raising problems for the identification of the words of an utterance. While ‘good examples’ of words are easily found—indicative of a prototype structure of the word category—the need to exhaustively segment each utterance into words also needs to be questioned. The consequences for quantitative linguistic analysis, e.g. of word frequency, are considerable.
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