Prosodic word vs. morphological word

There is yet another complication to using the term "word" in linguistic investigation: the morphological word does not always correspond to a prosodic word (often called phonological word).[2] This point involves the concept of word classes (popularly known in the English speaking world as "parts of speech"). For virtually all languages, the native grammatical tradition (where such exists) and modern linguistics both recognize that the lexemes of the language in question belong to one of a small set of lexical classes (categories of lexemes), such as "noun" and "verb".[3]

Some languages contain forms like the English he's. He's combines a noun and a verb -- it is not a member of any single English word class. That being so, he's is not a morphological "compound word" in the generally used sense of that term "compound word". Yet it meets the standard criteria for a phonological word. The apostrophe "s" allomorph of the word-form 'is' of the verb 'to be' is an enclitic attaching to a preceding noun phrase when that noun phrase is the syntactic subject: e.g., "she's here", "Bobby's leaving".

Here are examples from other languages of the failure of a single phonological word to coincide with a single morphological word-form. In Latin, one way to express the concept of 'NOUN-PHRASE1 and NOUN-PHRASE2' (as in "apples and oranges") is to suffix '-que' to the second noun phrase: "apples oranges-and", as it were. An extreme level of this theoretical quandary posed by some phonological words is provided by the Kwak'wala language.[4] In Kwak'wala, as in a great many other languages, meaning relations between nouns, including possession and "semantic case", are formulated by affixes instead of by independent "words". The three word English phrase, "with his club", where 'with' identifies its dependent noun phrase as an instrument and 'his' denotes a possession relation, would consist of two words or even just one word in many languages. But affixation for semantic relations in Kwak'wala differs dramatically (from the viewpoint of those whose language is not Kwak'wala) from such affixation in other languages for this reason: the affixes phonologically attach not to the lexeme they pertain to semantically, but to the preceding lexeme. Consider the following example (in Kwakw'ala, sentences begin with what corresponds to an English verb):[5]

kwixʔid-i-da bəgwanəmai-χ-a q�asa-s-isi t�alwagwayu

Morpheme by morpheme translation:

kwixʔid-i-da = clubbed-PIVOT-DETERMINER

bəgwanəma-χ-a = man-ACCUSATIVE-DETERMINER

q�asa-s-is = otter-INSTRUMENTAL-3.PERSON.SINGULAR-POSSESSIVE

t�alwagwayu = club.

"the man clubbed the otter with his club"

(Notation notes:

1. accusative case marks an entity that something is done to.

2. determiners are words such as "the", "this", "that".

3. the concept of "pivot" is a theoretical construct that is not relevant to this discussion.)

That is, to the speaker of Kwak'wala, the sentence does not contain the "words" 'him-the-otter' or 'with-his-club' Instead, the markers -i-da (PIVOT-'the'), referring to man, attaches not to bəgwanəma ('man'), but instead to the "verb"; the markers -χ-a (ACCUSATIVE-'the'), referring to otter, attach to bəgwanəma instead of to q�asa ('otter'), etc. To summarize differently: a speaker of Kwak'wala does not perceive the sentence to consist of these phonological words:

kwixʔid i-da-bəgwanəma χ-a-q�asa s-isi-t�alwagwayu

"clubbed PIVOT-the-mani him-the-otter with-hisi-club