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CHAPTER 6
WORD SHAPES
In this chapter, I examine the acceptable shapes of words in Mono. Some authors,
such as Hockett (1958: 284ff), refer to these as canonical forms. The shape of a word is
dependent on at least three parameters: (1) whether it is a lexical word or a grammatical
function word, (2) the specific grammatical category of the word, and (3) whether a word
is spoken in isolation or produced in the context of a sentence. I will take all three of
these parameters into consideration in discussing word shapes.
Lexical words are also referred to as content words or contentives. These include
words within the major grammatical categories of a language, usually taken to be nouns,
verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. They comprise an open class of words. Grammatical
function words are also referred to as grammatical words, function words, or functors.
These include conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns. 1 They comprise a closed class of
words. This distinction is important with respect to at least one typological observation.
McCarthy & Prince (1995) note that in a large number of the world’s languages, lexical
words must be at least bimoraic or disyllabic, depending on the language. Following
Goldsmith (1995), I will refer to this as a minimality condition (MC). 2 MCs do not appear
to be limited to a specific language family or geographic region. Kenstowicz (1994:
640ff) discusses examples from a diverse group of languages, including English, Yidin y ,
1 Hockett (1958: 264) includes substitutes (e.g. N → pronouns, V → ‘do’, Adv → ‘so’), markers,
inflectional affixes, and derivational affixes in the class of functors. Since not all of these morphemes
constitute words, he avoids the term “word”.
2 McCarthy & Prince claim that word minimality is derivable from two other notions: the Prosodic
Hierarchy and Foot Binarity. Thus there is no “Minimal Word Constraint” in their model.
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