Editing Word (section)

==Word boundaries==
The task of defining what constitutes a word involves determining where one word ends and another begins. There are several methods for identifying word boundaries present in speech:<ref name=Haspelmath2011/>
* '''Potential pause''': A speaker is told to repeat a given sentence slowly, allowing for pauses. The speaker will tend to insert pauses at the word boundaries. However, this method is not foolproof: the speaker could easily break up polysyllabic words, or fail to separate two or more closely linked words (e.g. "to a" in "He went to a house").
* '''Indivisibility''': A speaker is told to say a [[Sentence (linguistics)|sentence]] out loud, and then is told to say the sentence again with extra words added to it. Thus, "I have lived in this village for ten years." might become "My family and I have lived in this little village for about ten or so years." These extra words will tend to be added in the word boundaries of the original sentence. However, some languages have [[infix]]es, which are put inside a root. Similarly, some have [[separable affix]]es: in the [[German language|German]] sentence {{lang|de|Ich '''komme''' gut zu Hause '''an'''}}, the verb {{lang|de|ankommen}} is separated.
* '''Phonetic boundaries''': Some languages have particular rules of [[pronunciation]] that make it easy to spot where a word boundary should be. For example, in a language that regularly [[lexical stress|stresses]] the last syllable of a word, a word boundary is likely to fall after each stressed syllable. Another example can be seen in a language that has [[vowel harmony]] (like [[Turkish language|Turkish]]):<ref name=Bauer1983>{{Cite book |last=Bauer |first=Laurie |url=https://www.worldcat.org/oclc/8728300 |title=English word-formation |date=1983 |isbn=0-521-24167-7 |location=Cambridge [Cambridgeshire] |oclc=8728300}}</ref>{{rp|9}} the vowels within a given word share the same <em>quality</em>, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. Nevertheless, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.
* '''Orthographic boundaries''': Word separators, such as [[space (punctuation)|spaces]] and [[punctuation mark]]s can be used to distinguish single words. However, this depends on a specific language. East Asian writing systems often do not separate their characters. This is the case with [[Written Chinese|Chinese]], [[Japanese writing]], which use [[logographic]] characters, as well as [[Thai script|Thai]] and [[Lao script|Lao]], which are [[abugida]]s.