2.2 Words as types and words as tokens
How many words are there in the following sentence?
(1) Mary goes to Edinburgh next week, and she intends going to
Washington next month.
If we take as a guide the English spelling convention of placing a space
between each word, the answer seems clearly to be fourteen. But there is
also a sense in which there are fewer than fourteen words in the sentence,
because two of them (the words to and next) are repeated. In this sense,
the third word is the same as the eleventh, and the fifth word is the same
as the thirteenth, so there are only twelve words in the sentence. Let us
say that the third and the eleventh word of the sentence at (1) are distinct
WORDS, SENTENCES AND DICTIONARIES 5
tokens of a single type, and likewise the fifth and thirteenth word. (In
much the same way, one can say that two performances of the same tune,
or two copies of the same book, are distinct tokens of one type.)
The type–token distinction is relevant to the notion ‘word’ in this way.
Sentences (spoken or written) may be said to be composed of word tokens,
but it is clearly not word-tokens that are listed in dictionaries. It
would be absurd to suggest that each occurrence of the word next in (1)
merits a separate dictionary entry. Words as listed in dictionaries entries
are, at one level, types, not tokens – even though, at another level, one
may talk of distinct tokens of the same dictionary entry, inasmuch as the
entry for month in one copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionary is a different
token from the entry for month in another copy.
Is it enough, then, to say that characterisation 2. (words as buildingblocks)
relates to word-tokens and characterisation 1. (words as meaningful
units) relates to word-types? Again, if that were all there was to it,
this book could be quite short. The term word would be ambiguous
between a ‘type’ interpretation and a ‘token’ interpretation; but the
ambiguity would be just the same as is exhibited by many other terms
not specifically related to language, such as tune: a tune I heard this
morning may be ‘the same’ as one I heard yesterday (i.e. they may be
instances of the same type), but the two tokens that I have heard of it are
distinct. However, the relationship between words as building-blocks
and as meaningful units is not so simple as that, as we shall see. So, while
it is important to be alert to type–token ambiguity when talking about
words, recognising this sort of ambiguity is by no means all there is to
sorting out how characteristics 1. and 2. diverge.