2.1 Words: introduction

What words are

In this unit, you'll study what is probably the most basic unit of language, the word, focusing on words that are used to refer to categories of things in the world. Like language more generally, words have two sides, a form and a meaning. In this unit, we'll be spending most of our time on meaning. You'll learn more about the form of words if you continue to the unit on Phonology. If you continue to the unit on Grammar, you'll learn about how words are combined to form sentences with more complex meanings.

When we use the word word, we are often talking about its form, that is, how it sounds or how it is written. But a word is really a sort of place within language where a form and a meaning come together. Though both the form and the meaning may be complex, the word is a way of treating each as a sort of unit. Consider the English word pear. It is possible to pronounce this word in slightly different ways, and it will sound different for speakers of different ages and genders, but, as English speakers, we treat all of these realizations as the same form. The similar-sounding words bear and pier are treated as completely different words by English speakers. On the meaning end, there are likewise many possible kinds of pears, varying in color, texture, and flavor. But the fact that we have a word pear is a kind of claim that the similarities among these different fruits outweigh the differences, at least in certain situations. Apples and plums resembles pears in various ways, but they are not pears. That is, just as we as English speakers know how to distinguish the pronunciation of pear from the pronunciation of bear, we know how to distinguish pears from apples and plums.

In this unit we'll look at word meaning. This is an enormously complex subject, in fact one that is still not well understood by language scientists. To simplify matters, we'll look only at nouns, words that are used mainly for categories of objects, rather than words such as verbs and adjectives that describe categories of states, events, and properties. As in other MiniLing units, we'll also start with a small artificial language in an artificial world.