2. Problems inherent in the term word.

   As may well be clear by now, the present study is concerned with words and the subject matter of it is a word – the meaningful unit of communication. The term “word” is not a well-established element in the British tradition. Proof of that can be found in D. Crystal’s A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, which says that intuitively all language speakers know what is meant by a “word” [Crystal 2003]. By and large, they have no difficulty recognizing words on a page, spelling them correctly, looking them up in dictionaries and even playing games with them. They usually manage to use the right word in the right place. But one does not have to go far to see that a word is far from the simple and obvious matter it is thought to be and as a term it remains an extremely vague notion. When we look a little more closely, it becomes clear to us that we are sometimes not even sure where a word begins and where it ends. Is English-speaking one word or two? How do we decide about sequences like lunchtime (rather than lunch-time or lunch time), dinner-time, breakfast time? How many words in isn’t, pick-me-up, CD ? How about words that are spelled and sound alike, pairs like shape (‘the outline of’) – shape (‘to mold’), content (‘that which is contained’) – content (‘happy’), like (‘similar to’) – like (‘to be fond of’) etc. Apart from that, what about variants of one word, like give, gives, gave, given, giving? Suppose we encounter the sentence Stop procrastinating, and, if we are unfamiliar with the word ‘procrastinating’, we will use a dictionary to translate it. But it is not ‘procrastinating’ that we will be looking for, but rather ‘procrastinate’, since we feel it to be the base form and, as such, only this form – and not procrastinating, procrastinates or procrastinated – will find its way into the dictionary.  We assume that the word procrastinate is something more than a word – it is the unit of meaning which is behind the words   procrastinating, procrastinates and procrastinated and its semantic and grammatical content will be carried over to all the other inflected forms. So are these four different words, or is there just one word procrastinate with many forms? Are girl and girls, friend and friendly one word or two? Are loud, louder, loudest three forms of a single word loud? If so, what about good, better, best? Or five and fifth, one and first, two and second? And, by the same token, what about multiword combinations? Coming across the sentence He is all fingers and thumbs for the first time, we need to look it up in the dictionary. We are familiar with the meanings of individual words – all, fingers and thumbs – but those meanings put together do not seem to make any sense. Apparently the meaning of the whole phrase is different from the combined meanings of the constituent words. The sentence He is all fingers and thumbs is an idiom, that is a unit of meaning larger than a single word and its ultimate meaning is a result of reinterpretation of individual senses of the items constituting the phrase. Do we consider all the items within it as separate words or the entire combination as one word? Clearly finding answers to all these questions is by no means a straightforward matter.

   Furthermore, words are seldom if ever used in isolation and thus the meaning of a word is revealed only when it is realized in a context. So aside from making sense of individual words, language speakers need to be able to make words work together in concert. Very often we are puzzled why it is appropriate to say to do business but to make money, to say a strong wind but a heavy rain or a bright sun but a vivid example, etc. This list is endless. It is impossible to predict which words can go together with one another and which can’t. Collocability is a difficult area to navigate, and especially for a language learner, collocations have to be learned, just like individual words that make them up. We may wonder why the English use both sustain and suffer to go with losses, damage, injuries (cf. Ukr. «зазнати втрат, шкоди, збитків, травм тощо»), but only suffer can collocate with defeat, unlike Ukrainian, in which the verb «зазнавати» shows more consistent, and therefore, more predictable patterns  («зазнати поразки»). On the other hand, language speakers should be conscious of the rhetorical effects that words can generate:”…a word can hurt, excite, and decide a case” [Quick and Stein 1990 : 126].  It takes a certain level of language proficiency and communicative competence to appreciate metaphors in speech and writing (“It’s about time the company stepped up to the plate and resolved the conflict”), puns (“When the going gets tough, the tough get creative”; “Atheism is a non-prophet institution”), oxymorons (compassionate capitalism, edible pets, permanent revolution, conspicuously absent, devastatingly handsome, peaceful jihad etc.), zeugmas (You are free to execute your laws, and your citizens, as you see fit [from Star Trek: the Next Generation] etc. All of these examples demonstrate that their adequate perception requires a level of comprehension far beyond the level of a word, since the semantics of individual words cannot account for the semantics of the entire sentences. They also prove yet again that the right choice of words is the speaker’s tool and the speaker’s weapon. The wrong word may cause problems or, indeed, become a source of conflicts.

   Language is as immeasurable as reality itself; a lot of questions arise once we start analyzing it. But we do know by now that there is nothing accidental about the vocabulary of a language – each word is a small unit within a vast but perfectly balanced system.

   Modern theories of language are more concerned with how language works than why it exists. As a result, they tend to base their principles on observations of one or many languages. The theory will therefore depend on what is observed. In each field of knowledge concerned with language there are differing and often conflicting ways of observing linguistic facts. Speculating on the lexicon of a language, however, is common to any philosophical trend dealing with languages.