a text
to a linguistic student word by word; he tends, of course, to run his
words together as in actual speech, but if he is called to a halt and is
made to understand what is desired, he can readily isolate the words as
such, repeating them as units. He regularly refuses, on the other hand,
to isolate the radical or grammatical element, on the ground that it
"makes no sense."[6] What, then, is the objective criterion of the word?
The speaker and hearer feel the word, let us grant, but how shall we
justify their feeling? If function is not the ultimate criterion of the
word, what is?

[Footnote 6: These oral experiences, which I have had time and again as
a field student of American Indian languages, are very neatly confirmed
by personal experiences of another sort. Twice I have taught intelligent
young Indians to write their own languages according to the phonetic
system which I employ. They were taught merely how to render accurately
the sounds as such. Both had some difficulty in learning to break up a
word into its constituent sounds, but none whatever in determining the
words. This they both did with spontaneous and complete accuracy. In the
hundreds of pages of manuscript Nootka text that I have obtained from
one of these young Indians the words, whether abstract relational
entities like English _that_ and _but_ or complex sentence-words like
the Nootka example quoted above, are, practically without exception,
isolated precisely as I or any other student would have isolated them.
Such experiences with naive speakers and recorders do more to convince
one of the definitely plastic unity of the word than any amount of
purely theoretical argument.]

It is easier to ask the question than to answer it. The best that we can
do is to say that the word is one of the smallest, completely satisfying
bits of isolated "meaning" into which the sentence resolves itself. It
cannot be cut into without a disturbance of meaning, one or the other or
both of the severed parts remaining as a helpless waif on our hands. In
practice this unpretentious criterion does better service than might be
supposed. In such a sentence as _It is unthinkable_, it is simply
impossible to group the elements into any other and smaller "words" than
the three indicated. _Think_ or _thinkable_ might be isolated, but as
neither _un-_ nor _-able_ nor _is-un_ yields a measurable satisfaction,
we are compelled to leave _unthinkable_ as an integral whole, a