In this book we ask how ‘word’ should be defined. What are the criteria for ‘word’? Is ‘word’, as the term is generally understood, an appropriate unit to recognise for every type of language?

This introductory chapter first looks at what scholars have said about ‘word’, and then discusses the categories and distinctions which need to be examined. Chapter 2 suggests a number of typological parameters for the study of clitics. Following chapters then provide detailed examination of the notion of ‘word’ in a selection of spoken languages from Africa, North and South America, Australia, the Caucasus and Greece, together with a discussion of words in sign languages. The final chapter, by P. H. Matthews, asks what has been learnt from these general and particular studies.

This introduction begins by surveying the criteria that have been put forward for ‘word’, and suggests that one should sensibly keep apart phonological criteria, which define ‘phonological word’, and grammatical criteria, which define ‘grammatical word’. In some languages the two types of word coincide and one can then felicitously talk of a single unit ‘word’, which has a place both in the hierarchy of phonological units and in the hierarchy of grammatical units. In other languages phonological word and grammatical word generally coincide, but do not always do so. We may have a grammatical word consisting of a whole number of phonological words, or a phonological word consisting of a whole number of grammatical words.