Characteristics of the Word as the Basic Unit of Language

The word may be described as the basic unit of language. Uniting meaning and form, it is composed of one or more morphemes, each consisting of one or more spoken sounds or their written representation.
Within the scope of linguistics the word has been defined syntactically, semantically, phonologically and by combining various approaches.
It has been syntactically defined for instance as “the minimum sentence” by H. Sweet and much later be said to be, to a certain degree, equivalent to Sweet’s, as practically it amounts to the same thing: free forms are later defined as “forms which occur as sentences”.
E. Sapir takes into consideration the syntactic and semantic aspects when he calls the word “one of the smallest completely satisfying bits of isolated ‘meaning’,
1. Indivisibility
It cannot be cut into without a disturbance of meaning, one or two other or both of the several parts remaining as a helpless waif on our hands”. The essence of indivisibility will be clear from a comparison of the article a and the prefix a- in a lion and alive. A lion is a word-group because we can separate its elements and insert other words between them: a living lion, a dead lion. Alive is a word: it is indivisible, i.e. structurally impermeable: nothing can be inserted between its elements.
2. “Positional mobility” and “un interrupt abili ty”. – Ability of a word to change its position, its place in a sentence (They suddenly come out of a very nice house. Suddenly they come out of a very nice house).
3. Isolatability – ability of a word to function alone, to form sentence (Out!)
The word is the fundamental unit of language. It is a dialectical unity of form and content.

So, a word is the smallest significant unit of a given language capable of functioning alone and characterised by positional mobility within a sentence, morphological uninterruptability and semantic integrity. All these criteria are necessary because they permit us to create a basis for the oppositions between the word and the phrase, the word and the phoneme, and the word and the morpheme. The word is the fundamental unit of language. It is a dialectical unity of form and content. Its content or meaning is not identical to notion, but it may reflect human notions, and in this sense may be considered as the form of their existence. The acoustic aspect of the word serves to name objects of reality, not to reflect them. In this sense the word may be regarded as a sign.