Preliminaries

Lexicology is the study of words and their relationship to each other. A first step, then, is the determination of the boundaries of a word. While we all have an intuitive sense of what a word is, defining the term in a scientific manner is much more difficult. The typesetter might describe the word as any unit surrounded by spaces, in which case don't is one word but do not is two. This leads to such questions as: Do compound forms of a verb (Ishall have eaten) constitute one word or three? Is the term arc-en-ciel ‘rainbow’ one word or three? We see that lexical units, sometimes referred to as lexemes, might include more than one ‘word’.

At the same time, a single form might represent different words. The verb lead /lijd/ is a different word from the noun lead /lijd/ ‘dog's leash’. Even within the same grammatical category, ball (sporting equipment) is a different word from ball (a formal dance). Given these problems, Touratier (1998) proposed a set of defining characteristics to distinguish the ‘word’ from a ‘morpheme’, insisting on the autonomy of the word. Through the characteristic of ‘moveability’, a word can be moved about in its sentence context, while bound morphemes cannot be (see section 3.3.1). The second criterion is ‘separability’, by which we recognize that a word is independent because it can be separated from the surrounding constituents of a phrase, i.e. it is not part of a fixed phrase.