What are words?

We can be impressed by the number of words someone knows. But how many words do native speakers know, on average This is one of the questions that many linguists hate to have to answer, but love to be able to ask. There are at least two notions that need defining before the question can even be addressed – what is a word’, and what does it mean to know’ a word The first of these seems trivial but is not. One important issue is that the notion of word’ is different when applied to different languages see the example in the sidebar. But even if we gloss over language differences and reach a tacit agreement that words are what are separated by spaces in printed text so that in these parentheses there are nine words, then we still have to face the question of whether a and as are two entirely separate words or two versions’ of the same word. Or whether foot and feet are two words. Or whether houseboat is a different word from both house and boat. Or whether phone-tree is two words or one. Or whether old is the same word in old news and old friends.

The second issue we need to consider is what knowing’ a word entails. A distinction can be drawn between passive and active vocabularies – most speakers can understand more words than they are likely to use in their own speech. But also there are words that we see and understand in print, but have never encountered in speech and occasionally vice versa.

Given these uncertainties about what words are and what it means to know them, it is not surprising that estimates of the average vocabulary size vary considerably. ou will easily find estimates in the range of 20,000 to 75,000 words. In the Introduction p. 2 we took an estimate at the con servative end, of 20,000 words Nation, (2006). We saw how with a vocabulary of that size and a search speed of 100 words per second, it would take someone 3 minutes to search exhaustively through their mental lexicon to discover that they did not know the word splundle. Trivial though it may seem, this example is useful as an illustration of how efficiently we recognise words or in this case recognise that a word-like beast is not a word we know, and it immediately suggests some key aspects of how we look for words in our mental lexicons. At the very least it shows that we do not do this by matching some input e.g. the spoken form of splundle against each and every word that we know.

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الآخبار التكنلوجية

رصد نوع نادر من القطط في تايلاند للمرة الأولى منذ عقود

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كيف قاد إيلون ماسك حملة "غروك" لاختراق عرش الذكاء الاصطناعي

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المزيد

مواضيع ذات صلة

Sources of typicality effects

The theory of idealised cognitive models

Problems with prototype theory

The horizontal dimension

The vertical dimension

The categorisation system

Principles of categorization

Prototype theory

The problem of prototypicality

The problem of conceptual fuzziness

The definitional problem

The classical theory