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It's been basically a couple of years I struggle to understand the distinction between fusional, agglutinative and isolating languages.

I realized that I might miss the point of all the discussions and articles I read because I don't know what a word means in linguistics.

I tried hard but nowhere I found a proper definition for the term word.

Could someone present it here? Examples are welcome!

GA1
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    In my linguists lecturers they said the best definition was "the thing you put spaces around." They were only partly joking ;) – curiousdannii Jan 04 '17 at 13:08
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    I hope they were definitely joking! Spaces are something totally arbitrary. Chinese language put spaces between every syllable/character (morpheme), and no one even thinks about saying that every Chinese word (whatever it is) is built with only one syllable/character (morpheme). Vietnamese do the same thing.

    Polish write "chciałby" (He would), Russians write their equivalent as "хотел бу", but these "words" convey almost the same meaning!

    Linguists somehow examined the vocabulary (and words) of the language communities that had no writing system.

     – GA1 Jan 04 '17 at 13:13
  • Well more generally, there is no definition with absolute acceptance, and partial definitions which might be accepted by all linguists may not be complete enough to be useful. Different frameworks will consider different things to be words and non-words. I think there is probably consensus on what a prosodic word is, but not a syntactic word. – curiousdannii Jan 04 '17 at 13:18
  • I would love to hear what is the globally-agreed definition of prosodic word! – GA1 Jan 04 '17 at 13:19
  • Thank you, I did not find the answer to the question satisfying as it concentrates on a particular language which is English. Also the question in the thread is not as general as the posted here. – GA1 Jan 04 '17 at 16:19
  • There are linguists who believe there is no universal definition. :) Edit: But yeah, the most common definition (and also the most controversial one) is Bloomfield's 'minimal free forms'. – WavesWashSands Jan 04 '17 at 17:13
  • Doethe concept of a word exist in every language. In Sanskrit what actually exist are the primitive 'dhatu's -- (whch cannot be called words ?).the sanskrit term for a word actually refers to an utterance in the sense of linguistic performance. – ARi Jan 05 '17 at 17:10

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There is no such "universal" definition - and if there were one, it would be useless.

Every linguist decides whether they need a word as a concept in their analysis and if they choose to have words, they decide what a word is in that particular language they work with.

For a very readable, recent and succinct discussion of wordhood see The Oxford Handbook of Word (2015), esp. Wray 2015.

Alex B.
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  • Such definition must exist as the higher level definitions like fusional language/agglutinative language etc. are based on it. – GA1 Jan 05 '17 at 11:13
  • Whose definitions, yours? It seems you've made up your mind already, so I don't see a lot of room for constructive discussion. – Alex B. Jan 05 '17 at 15:21