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> Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words? Not the interesting part, I think. Is the English un- a word? Before you reflexively say no, consider that it ha
by mananaysiempre 2y ago
> Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words?
Not the interesting part, I think.
Is the English un- a word? Before you reflexively say no, consider that it has a specific meaning even though it never appears on its own and never receives word stress.
Is the French je a word? Before you reflexively say yes, consider that it never appears on its own and never receives word stress even though it has a specific meaning.
Is the Latin que a word? (The Q in SPQR, “senatus populusque Romanus”, although perhaps it’d be more authentic to write “SENATVSPOPVLVSQVEROMANVS”.) It has a well-defined meaning: “and”. It goes after whatever word you’d put “and” before; not syntactic constituent, word. It counts as a part of that word for the purposes of stress, so POpulus but popuLUSque.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago> Is the French je a word? Before you reflexively say yes, consider that it never appears on its own and never receives word stress even though it has a specific meaning. And? That doesn't change what the word "word" mean. Even in french, where "word" is "mot". There's no rule saying that a word has to be able to appear on its own to be named a "word". More specifically "je" is defined, by linguists, in french, as a "mot grammatical". https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mot_grammatical https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mot_grammatical Maybe what you're after is the difference between a "mot grammatical" and a "mot lexical"? But both are "mots" (words).