Towards a Description of Word, an Urdu Corpus-Based Approach

A great deal of scholarly discussion has centered on the linguistic status of the word. It would be useful to draw attention to two fairly general and constant characteristics of words across a wide range of languages. The first is that a word is typically the smallest element that can be moved around without destroying the grammaticality of the sentence (ignoring any semantic effects) But no means all word are equally mobile in this sense, but with very few exceptions, the smallest mobile units are words. The morphemes constituting a single word have a rigidly a fixed sequential order. The second major characteristic of words is that they are typically the largest units that resist „interruption" by the insertion of new material between their constituent parts. Even these two traditional views about the phenomenon of word do not cover all the mechanism of word. It was due to this reason that the term “Lexical Item” was introduced. Let us debate in detail that what the inconsistencies were in the traditional concept of “word” and how the “Lexical item” is a useful and neutral hold –all term that captures and helps to over come instabilities in the term “Word”.