Beyond grammatical and phonological words

Abstract

AbstractThis paper reviews recent research on the cross‐linguistic comparison of wordhood domains. A prominent solution to misalignments in wordhood domains is to distinguish between grammatical (morphosyntactic, morphological) words and phonological (prosodic) words. Recent studies reveal problems with this solution insofar as it is meant to serve as a basis for cross‐linguistic comparison. Language‐internal divergences within morphosyntactic domains and the phonological domains are not straightforwardly handled by the grammatical‐phonological word distinction. Moreover, cross‐linguistic variation in the motivation for these constituents is such that it is not clear that the grammatical/phonological word of one language is comparable to that of the next. Recent descriptive and typological studies seek to overcome these problems by questioning some of the methodological and conceptual assumptions underlying the concept of a word and the interpretation of wordhood diagnostics.