Abstract:

Words form a fundamental basis for the study of language, its syntax, semantics and phonology. However, the precise ontology of words has eluded many philosophers and linguists. A persistent difficulty for most accounts of words is the type-token distinction (Bromberger 1989, Kaplan 1990). In this paper, I present a novel account of words which differs from the atomistic and platonistic conceptions of previous accounts which I argue fall prey to this problem.

Specifically, I proffer a structuralist account of linguistic items, along the lines of structuralism in the philosophy of mathematics (Shapiro 1997), in which words are defined as positions in larger structures. I follow Szabó (1999) and Parsons (1990) in further defining words as quasi-concrete objects according to a representation relation. This view aims for general correspondence with contemporary generative linguistic approaches to the study of language.