929: What Makes a Word (pt. 2/3) Jun 25, 2017

This is the second part to the post yesterday about what makes a word a word. As alluded to then, an affix is not a word for the reason that it does not carry its own meaning; but additionally this is so because it is bound to the word it modifies. In spelling this is quite clear as there is no space between an affix and the stem, also called a 'free morpheme'. Nevertheless, there are words like 'will' or 'may' that modify the meaning of a word in a similar fashion to the past-tense suffix '-ed', so it might seem that those should not be considered words, but they are. There are two reasons for this. First, English does not technically have a future-tense, so 'will' does not change the tense per se, but the mood and is therefore not comparable to other tense-changing suffixes necessarily; second—and more importantly—it can be moved around in a clause and does not need to be put with the verb. One could say, for example, "I will pay" or "I will, in a while, pay" but while one could also say "I payed", "I pay soon -ed" is not grammatical". Some constructions like 'un-fucking-believable" allow for this sort of separation, but in this case 'fucking' is a rare kind of infix.

Tomorrow these ideas will be compared with other languages.