1. Words, sentences and dictionaries
By :
Deny Ferdiansah
Dayang Nurfaizah
Diani Rahmatul Fitri
Febi Marelia
2. Agenda
For Today
01
Wordsas types and
wordsas tokens
02
03 04
Wordsas meaningful
building-blocks of
language
Wordswithpredictable
meanings
Non-words with
Unpredictable
meanings
3. We are inclined to feel, when words are strung together meaningfully. That is
not to say that a sentence must always consist of more than one word. One-
word commands such as ‘Go!’ or ‘Sit!’.
Even as adults, there are quite a few circumstances in which we use single
words outside the context of any actual or reconstructable sentence. Here
are some examples:
• warning shouts, such as ‘Fire!’
• conventional commands, such as ‘Lights!’, Camera!’, ‘Action!’
• items on shopping lists, such as ‘carrots’, ‘cheese’, ‘eggs’.
1. in that they have meanings that are unpredictable and so must be listed
in dictionaries, and
2. in that they are the building-blocks out of which phrases and sentences
are formed.
Words as meaningful
building-blocks of
language
4. Words as types
and words as
tokens
The type–token distinction is relevant to the notion ‘word’
in this way. Sentences (spoken or written) may be said to
be composed of wordtokens, but it is clearly not word-
tokens that are listed in dictionaries. It would be absurd to
suggest that each occurrence of the word next in (1)
merits a separate dictionary entry.
Words as listed in dictionaries entries are, at one level,
types, not tokens – even though, at another level, one
may talk of distinct tokens of the same dictionary entry,
inasmuch as the entry for month in one copy of the
Concise Oxford Dictionary is a different token from the
entry for month in another copy.
5. Words with predictable
meanings
There are some words whose sound seems to reflect their meaning fairly
directly. These include so-called onomatopoeic words, such as words for
animal cries: bow-wow, miaow, cheep, cock-a-doodle-doo.
kinds of word do have predictable meanings, then? The answer is:
any words that are composed of independently identifiable parts, where the
meaning of the parts is sufficient to determine the meaning of the whole
word.
6. In Section 2.3 we saw that it is possible for a linguistic item to be a basic
building-block of syntax – that is, an item that is clearly not itself a sentence
or a phrase – and yet to have a meaning that is predictable. We saw, in other
words, that characteristic 2. does not necessarily entail characteristic 1. In
this section we will see that characteristic
1. does not necessarily entail characteristic
2. that is, something that is clearly larger than a word (being composed of
two or more words) may nevertheless have a meaning that is not
entirely predictable from the meanings of the words that compose it.
Non-words with
unpredictable meanings
