WORDS

 

” I’m tired of always trusting people and being let down.”

…do YOU ever feel this way?

 

Doesn’t anybody believe in keeping their word anymore?

 
 

 
In language, a word is the smallest free form that may be uttered in isolation with semantic or pragmatic content (with literal or practical meaning). This contrasts with a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning but will not necessarily stand on its own. A word may consist of a single morpheme (for example: oh!, rock, red, quick, run, expect), or several (rocks, redness, quickly, running, unexpected), whereas a morpheme may not be able to stand on its own as a word (in the words just mentioned, these are -s, -ness, -ly, -ing, un-, -ed).
 
A complex word will typically include a root and one or more affixes (rock-s, red-ness, quick-ly, run-ning, un-expect-ed), or more than one root in a compound (black-board, rat-race). Words can be put together to build larger elements of language, such as phrases (a red rock), clauses (I threw a rock), and sentences (he threw one too but he missed).

The term word may refer to a spoken word or to a written word, or sometimes to the abstract concept behind either. Spoken words are made up of units of sound called phonemes, and written words of symbols called graphemes, such as the letters of English.

The ease or difficulty of deciphering a word depends on the language. Dictionaries categorize a language’s lexicon (i.e., its vocabulary) into lemmas. These can be taken as an indication of what constitutes a “word” in the opinion of the writers of that language. Words make up a language.
 
 

Semantic definition

Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of “Minimal Free Forms” in 1926. Words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by themselves. This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms, as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of).

Some semanticists have proposed a theory of so-called semantic primitives or semantic primes, indefinable words representing fundamental concepts that are intuitively meaningful. According to this theory, semantic primes serve as the basis for describing the meaning, without circularity, of other words and their associated conceptual denotations.
 
 

Features

In the Minimalist school of theoretical syntax, words (also called lexical items in the literature) are construed as “bundles” of linguistic features that are united into a structure with form and meaning. For example, the word “bears” has semantic features (it denotes real-world objects, bears), category features (it is a noun), number features (it is plural and must agree with verbs, pronouns, and demonstratives in its domain), phonological features (it is pronounced a certain way), etc.
 
 

Word Boundaries

The task of defining what constitutes a “word” involves determining where one word ends and another word begins—in other words, identifying word boundaries.

There are several ways to determine where the word boundaries of spoken language should be placed:
Potential pause: A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly, allowing for pauses. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words, or fail to separate two or more closely related words.

Indivisibility: A speaker is told to say a sentence out loud, and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus, I have lived in this village for ten years might become My family and I have lived in this little village for about ten or so years. These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have infixes, which are put inside a word. Similarly, some have separable affixes; in the German sentence “Ich komme gut zu Hause an”, the verb ankommen is separated.

Phonetic boundaries: Some languages have particular rules of pronunciation that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example, in a language that regularly stresses the last syllable of a word, a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony (like Turkish): the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. Nevertheless, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.

In practice, linguists apply a mixture of all these methods to determine the word boundaries of any given sentence. Even with the careful application of these methods, the exact definition of a word is often still very elusive.
 
 

Philosophy

Philosophers have found words objects of fascination since at least the 5th century BC, with the foundation of the philosophy of language. Plato analyzed words in terms of their origins and the sounds making them up, concluding that there was some connection between sound and meaning, though words change a great deal over time. John Locke wrote that the use of words “is to be sensible marks of ideas”, though they are chosen “not by any natural connexion that there is between particular articulate sounds and certain ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of such an idea”. Wittgenstein’s thought transitioned from a word as representation of meaning to “the meaning of a word is its use in the language.”

 

 
 

VIDEO ONLINE ONLY – WORDS Amnesty International

 
This video is a Webby Award winner. Amnesty International supporters have used the power of words to demand freedom and justice for countless human rights defenders around the world. Our words are proof that when you stand up for human rights, you never stand alone.

Production Company (animation): Curious Pictures
Director: Rohitash Rao
Director of Photography: David Griffiths
Producer: Pamela Mahan
Voice over: Nazanin Boniadi
Music: Elias Arts

Production Company (introduction): Pictures in a Row
Director: Peter Lang
Producer: Andrew Halpern
Spokesperson: Morgan Freeman

 

” Communication is a wondrous thing. There is considerable time and effort being expended upon your planet at this time around the idea of improving communication. Many gifted people are dedicating themselves to the task of searching for just the right words and phrases that will give tangible form to the various new energies and abstract ideas which seek entrance into your world at this time.

Whether a person’s expressions are wonderfully unique, or whether they are simple and mundane—communications that are made produce verbal encapsulations of beings and essences that previously existed within a state that knew no boundaries at all. For a newly-birthed idea (which, by the way, you often refer to as a “concept”), existence on the physical plane can be a combination of pure wonder and sheer terror. We speak now as though each idea is a whole person, because it is. It simply lives at a different vibration, that’s all.

It could be said that the minute a word leaves your lips or your pen it is on its way to becoming obsolete. In many ways, the energy within it begins to harden and die. That which was once liquid and alive is suddenly set in concrete. But it also has a chance to be seen, heard, and appreciated. It is for this reason that so many energies are lining up in the etheric planes to climb aboard a word or phrase and make their uncertain journey into this World of Form.”

 
Read more, CLICK HERE.