What are words?

What Does Words Mean

We explain what words are, what types exist, how they are formed, and word families. Also, what is the "word of God."

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Words can be combined into phrases or sentences.

What are words?

A word is the minimum grammatical unit endowed with its own meaning . In the spoken chain, it is separated from the others by pauses, and in writing by blank spaces.

His study responds to very different perspectives, ranging from their meaning to their composition from smaller pieces (called morphemes), and their subsequent combination in linear sequences (called syntagmas), which in turn make up larger units (the phrases or sentences ). So the word is the starting point of the analysis of verbal language .

The term word comes from the Latin parabŏla and shares its point of origin, precisely, with the parable, which is the Greek word parabolê : the action of throwing something next to something else to compare them ( pára- , "next to"; ballo , "throw"). Throughout history , this term underwent an inversion of its sounds r and l (something appreciable in the Italian term parola or in French parole ) in vulgar Latin, until it ended up becoming a "word" in Spanish.

Obviously, all languages handle their own words, formed differently and operating according to their own logic. This is because each language has a different grammatical history, directly linked to the history of its speakers.

According to traditional linguistics , all the words that exist have a meaning (an abstract and mental sense that refers to some aspect of reality ) and a signifier (an oral and / or written form that corresponds to it and that distinguishes it from the others language words).

For example, the term "tree" has a meaning that all human beings have experienced in one way or another (that of those immobile, tall and ancient beings that have branches, leaves, and bear fruit), but an exclusively Hispanic signifier. ("Tree", which in other languages will be " tree ", " baum ", " albero " or " arbre ").

See also: Grammar

Types of words

Words can be classified in many and varied ways, so many that it is difficult to list them all. For example, it is possible to distinguish between good and bad words (that is, those that are appropriate for formal occasions and those that are not), between compound and simple words (depending on whether they are the product of a fusion of other words or not), or in Spanish between grave , acute and esdrújulas words according to the location of their stressed syllable.

However, perhaps the most important classification is the one that distinguishes between its grammatical categories, that is, on the basis of their function within the logic of the language. Thus, we have:

  • Nouns . They are the words that name objects of reality (concrete or abstract), that is, things that have substance. Its function within the language is to act as labels. For example: dog, planet, building, subsoil, Jose, America, Paris, Luxembourg.
  • Verbs . They are the words that name actions, and whose form is usually adapted (depending on the language) to the specific way in which the action was carried out (conjugation). In Spanish, the verbs present a verb tense, a verb mode and a verbal person for this. They are examples of verb: run, sleep, was born, they will come, we said, love, I will live.
  • Adjectives . They are the words that serve to add meanings to a noun or a pronoun, providing their own meaning to what is said. They are one of the types of modifiers that exist, since they are used to precisely modify the proper meaning of nouns. For example: ugly, pretty, big, little, quirky, grad, yellow, abundant.
  • Adverbs . They are the words that serve to add meanings to verbs, or to adjectives themselves, or even to other adverbs. They are the most versatile of the language modifiers. For example: very, so, quickly, especially, how, where, yesterday, here, quite a bit.
  • Articles . They are the words that serve to specify two specific aspects of a noun or a pronoun, which are the number and the gender. In some languages, such as English, there is a single article for everything ( the ), while in Spanish there are two: masculine ( el ) and feminine ( la ), and in German there are three different ones: masculine ( der ), feminine ( die). ) and neutral ( das ).
  • Pronouns . They are the words that serve to substitute nouns (or sometimes whole fragments of a sentence), in order to make the language more agile and less repetitive. In principle, they are words without a fixed meaning, but they acquire it according to the context in which they are being used, thus expressing a certain type of relationship. For example: you, me, it, it, her, we, you, you, her, my.
  • Propositions . They are the words that serve to indicate relationships between the other words, whatever their type, to gain higher levels of precision with respect to what is said. Their meaning is always grammatical, that is, typical of what the language is capable of expressing, and they can indicate spatial, material, belonging relationships and an immense etcetera. For example: from, to, over, by, in, with, from, to, under, between.
  • Conjunctions . They are the words that allow you to join other words or terms in a sentence (or even sentences with each other) to form chains of meaning. They have no meaning outside the language, that is, they make sense only as props of the language. For example: and, but, nevertheless, nevertheless, additionally, or, although.
  • Interjections . They are words of meaning and fixed form in the language, which are used for pragmatic purposes, that is, to express information outside of what has been said, usually of an emotional or subjective nature. Many come from proverbs or words of the past, which only half survive and have lost their original meaning. They are an example of this: ay, eh, wham, hello, bye, hopefully, go.

Word formation

Words are formed through several different processes, since they do not all have the same origin. These processes are the following:

Composition . Composition is a process of "manufacturing" words from the union or joining of two roots of words (lexical roots) each endowed with its own meaning. In some languages, such as German, this process is more complex and produces long and complicated terms from many different words, while in Spanish it usually encompasses two (in some cases three) different terms in the same new word.

For example:

  • Two different nouns : cauliflower, turning, motochorro.
  • Two different verbs : take and give me, sleep, seesaw.
  • Two different adjectives : deaf-mute, bittersweet, high and low.
  • A verb and a noun : corkscrew, can opener, party pooper.
  • A noun and an adjective : aquamarine, redhead, gaping.
  • An adjective and a noun : midnight, safe conduct, bas-relief.
  • An adverb and an adjective : badly thought, biepensante, welcome.
  • A pronoun and a verb : chores, anyone, whoever.

Bypass . Derivation is another different process through which new words are obtained, which consists of adding derivative particles (affixes) to the root of a word, in order to obtain new terms with a meaning similar to the original. Depending on the type of particle used, we can speak of prefixes , suffixes , infixes or inflections:

  • Prefixation . It consists of adding a particle before another word, to modify its original meaning. In these cases, however, it is almost a compositional process, since the prefixes in Spanish all have their own meaning (since they are mostly inherited from ancient languages). For example: invisible ( in prefix , visible word ), submarine ( sub prefix , marine word ).
  • Sufijación . La principal fuente de palabras derivadas del idioma es la sufijación, que consiste en añadir una partícula al final de la raíz léxica. Así, de una misma raíz se pueden derivar palabras muy diferentes entre sí, tal y como en el siguiente ejemplo: de la raíz flor se puede derivar florería (añadiendo el sufijo – ería ), florero (añadiendo el sufijo – ero ), floración (añadiendo el infijo – a – y el sufijo – ción ), floresta (añadiendo el sufijo – esta ) o floritura (añadiendo el infijo – it – y el sufijo – ura ).
  • Bending . The inflection is an extremely common case of grammatical derivation, since it is what happens when we conjugate a verb: we add to the stem an ending that does not change its lexical sense (the one that appears in the dictionary), but only its grammatical sense. For example, to the lexical stem camin- you can add various inflectional suffixes, such as -ar (walk), - o (way), - as (walk), - emos (let's walk), - abas (you walked), adapting the root to different grammatical cases, without altering its basic meaning.

Parasynthesis . Parasynthesis is the case in which composition and derivation processes of different nature occur at the same time, in order to obtain a new word through various simultaneous processes. Such is the case, for example, of paraguazo, the result of the composition of para and aguas , as well as the derivation with the suffix - azo . Other cases are orange, quinceañera or flushed.

Grammaticalization . Unlike the others, it is a process that occurs diachronically, that is, over time. It consists of the change of meaning of a word present in the language, due to the loss of its real referent (which would commonly mean that the word is no longer used) and its replacement by a merely grammatical sense, that is, functional to the language.

A clear example of this is the modern use of the verb to have, whose original meaning of "to have" or "to possess" was lost in time and was replaced with the use of having as an auxiliary verb of compound tenses: "to have had", "Have come", "you will have said", "they will have wanted", and so on.

Word families

When we speak of word families or lexical families, we refer to a set of words that share the same root of lexical meaning , that is, that are the result of derivative and / or inflectional processes starting from the same root. Thus, the "ancestral" words are called primitive words, and their descendants, derived words.

An example of a lexical family is that from the root sea : tide, maritime, sailor, seasick, swell, tide, marinate, submarine, etc. As we can see, the lexical families share the same root meaning, although they express it in totally different ways, since they are different words from each other.

More in: Lexical family

God's word

The "word of God" is spoken of with a fixed and exclusive meaning, which is to refer to the sacred scriptures of some monotheistic religion , especially the Christian ones, predominant in the West. The Bible, in that sense, constitutes for the faithful the transcription of the word of God, that is to say, that for them what is contained in these books is not the result of human inventiveness, but rather a dictation of the supreme being to its ancient prophets.

Continue with: Lexicon

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