Words in Japanese

Although Japanese does not divide words orthographically, there is no doubt that the notion of ‘word’ is highly salient for native speakers of this language. Words are talked about, joked about, used as strategies for secrecy and exclusion. They are regarded as having enormous evocative power and euphonic beauty. While we can clearly distinguish phonological and grammatical criteria for Japanese words, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the grammatical word and the phonological word coincide. This is, however, not invariably the case. Japanese exhibits two possibilities for the non-coincidence of phonological and grammatical words: the first in which a grammatical word consists of a whole number of phonological words, and the second in which a phonological word consists of a whole number of grammatical words. Cases in which a single word can stand alone as a full utterance are quite common, and are limited to those in which the two word types coincide completely.