words and morphemes
In traditional grammar, words are the basic units of analysis. Grammarians
classify words according to their parts of speech and identify and list the
forms that words can show up in. Although the matter is really very complex,
for the sake of simplicity we will begin with the assumption that we are
all generally able to distinguish words from other linguistic units. It will be
sufficient for our initial purposes if we assume that words are the main units
used for entries in dictionaries. In a later section, we will briefly describe
some of their distinctive characteristics.