Siska Hardiana Safitri_Theoritical Foundation

Chapter II
Theoretical Foundation

Word Formation in Short Messages Text
A. Definition of Word

Some people say that word is arbiter. It is unit of the smallest word which self-supporting. Based on KBBI (2001:513),”Word is the unsure of word which is spoken or written and it is as realization between thought and feeling and used in speaking.” Word is also a meaningful sound or combination of sounds that is a unit of language or its representation in a text. It is also used as a way for communication to inform or news about somebody or something. We can do everything by word. The congruity in society also can be realized when we are using the right word.

There are a lot of linguists define the meaning of words. Leonard Bloomfield introduced the concept of "Minimal Free Forms" in 1926. He puts that words are thought of as the smallest meaningful unit of speech that can stand by them. This correlates phonemes (units of sound) to lexemes (units of meaning). However, some written words are not minimal free forms, as they make no sense by themselves (for example, the and of).

Different with Bloomfield, Ingo Plag in his book entitled Word Formation in English said that the word could be defined in four other ways: in terms of sound structure (i.e. phonologically), in terms of its internal integrity, in terms of meaning (i.e. semantically), or in terms of sentence structure (i.e. syntactically).
Both of them are actually have the similar characteristic to define the word itself. They agree that word should correlate with phonologically. The difference between them is Ingo Plag explained more specific to part each of defining way. In this case, the different perception to define the meaning of word is ordinarily. Everyone also has different sense to observe about it and we shouldn’t blame one another.

Personally, I prefer Ingo Plag to Bloomfield. The meaning concept of word which revealed by Plag is more comprehensive and easier to understand. I agrees on Plag that word could be defined in terms of sound structure (i.e. phonologically), in terms of its internal integrity, in terms of meaning (i.e. semantically), or in terms of sentence structure (i.e. syntactically). Word is couldn’t mistakenly be defined. We should to know first the context of it. Sometimes we will lose the point of word when we don’t pay attention the aspects of word. When we have already knew how the way to define word, so we have to be careful using some word in order there is no mistake when we try to use words in every term.

Reference:
Plag, Ingo. 2002. Word-Formation in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Asher, Ron. 1993. Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics. Elsevier.
Jauhari, Heri. 2007. Pedoman Penulisan Karya Ilmiah. Bandung: CV Pustaka Setia.
Language. Microsoft Encarta. 2007.