Talk:Word (language)

Disambiguation

This will need disambiguation. There is at least also "Word (mathematics)". Should this be "Word (language)", or should the title stay "Word"? Peter Schmitt 09:27, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

I agreed so I went ahead and moved the article. I would argue that Word should redirect here by default, unless others think it likely that many readers would be searching for e.g. Microsoft Word. John Stephenson 08:50, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

Re opening sentence of Word (language)

John, the opening sentence (clause) reads: "A word is a unit of language which exists in contrast to other forms such as phrases;..."

Would the following improve it: "A word is a meaningful unit of language which exists in contrast to other meaningful forms such as phrases and sentences;..."? Stressing 'meaningful', as having meaning characterizes all words. Anthony.Sebastian 03:46, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure about that: it would exclude nonsense words, which are also words. You could argue that nonsense words are not words until someone coins a new word that was previously a nonsense word, I suppose, but that doesn't allow us to define what a word is in itself. A nonsense word is still a word on syntactic, morphological and phonological grounds even if semantically empty. I realise the current definition is inadequate - effectively a what-is-a-planet definition, i.e. it's something that's not a phrase, sentence, etc. - but it's very hard to come up with an explicit definition of what is really something intuitive to us. I'm open to suggestions but I don't think that emphasising meaning is the way to go. John Stephenson 05:32, 9 October 2009 (UTC)