Words altogether

This chapter recapitulates the essence of the concepts of phonological and grammatical word discussed throughout the volume. Defining a phonological and a grammatical word is relatively straightforward for some languages, less so for others. For instance, components of a grammatical word generally occur in fixed order; but this can be challenged by highly synthetic languages of Amazonia. Generally, a phonological and a grammatical word tend to coincide. Recurrent mismatches between phonological and grammatical word involve reduplication, compounding, and noun incorporation. Further typical mismatches involve clitics—morphemes which can be shown to form a grammatical word, but cannot be pronounced on their own. Clitics can be distinguished from affixes based on a number of features, including selectivity of the host, position in a word, and phonological rules applying on the respective boundaries. The chapter then addresses the question of the applicability of the concept ‘word’ to languages of different types discussed in the volume.