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Chapter One Introduction 

1.1 Rationale of the Study 
The  study  of  wordhood  has  been  a  hot  and  eye-catching  issue  in  recent  years’ linguistic study, and it also has been fiercely discussed for many years. It is difficult to distinguish  whether  a  form  is  a  word  or  nonword  in  Chinese,  so  is  in  English.  As Dixon  (2002,  pp.1-37)  comments  that  in  these  languages  like  English  and  some European languages (such as French, Russian and Germany), the word is regarded as the  basic  unit  of  people’s  daily  communication.  For  example,  in  Old  English  ‘word’ refers to speech, but in modern English it refers to element between spaces. It seems that the term “word” is so generally understood that all the languages have words or a lexeme  for  ‘word’  and  recognize  “word”  as  the  basic  or  appropriate  unit.  Actually, there  are  only  some  languages  having  “words”,  which  is  the  opposition  of  Dixon’s (1977, p.88) erroneous statement that “every (or almost every) language has word for ‘word’”  and  Wierzbicka’s  opinion  (1998,  pp.141-194)  that  “word  as  a  universal semantic primitive is said to be realized in every language”. Whether a form is a word or nonword, is still a stubborn difficulty. According to the topic of the meeting—The Word  and  the  Morpheme  which  is  going  to  be  held  in  September,  2016  in  Berlin, German,  we  can  realize  that  wordhood  as  an  unsolved  problem  is  a  hot  and eye-catching issue as before, which in some degree also provides reliable evidence to show that our thesis on wordhood in modern English is practicable.  
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1.2 Objectives of the Study 
This  study  mainly  concentrates  on  the  theory  of  Language  as  a  Complex Adaptive  System  to  illustrate  the  wordhood  in  the  native  language  dictionary  The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (5th Ed.). As a result, data is an essential and necessary part of this study. To be specific, this study concentrates on the  recognition  of  the  lexical  status  and  other  treatment  of  words  especially  partial words and multiword expressions in the dictionary.   The objectives of this thesis can be concluded from the following two points: (1)  From  the  academic  point  of  view,  this  empirical  thesis  will  supply  enough evidences  to  prove  the  rationality  of  Language  as  a  Complex  Adaptive  System  in  a convincing  way.  By  presenting  evidence  of  how  these  words  are  treated &n本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。