Phonological words
A phonological word can be defined as a string of sounds that behaves as a unit for certain kinds of phonological processes, especially stress or accent. For the most part, we don’t have to distinguish phonological words from other kinds of words. It makes no difference for the words morphology, calendar, Mississippi, or hot dog whether we think of them as phonological words or morphological words. Sometimes we do need to separate the two notions. In English, every phonological word has a main stress. Elements that are written as separate words but do not have their own stress are therefore not phonological words in English. Consider again the sentence The hot dogs ran for the lake. Think now in terms of word stress. The sentence has seven words, but only four-word stresses, there being no stress on the or for. In fact, the English written word the receives stress only under unusual circumstances, in exchanges like the following:
(10) A: I saw Jennifer Lopez on Fifth Avenue last night.
B : Not the Jennifer Lopez?
Prepositions like for sometimes have stress, but as often as not are also included in the stress domain of the following word. We therefore say that the string for the lake, which we write as three separate words, is a single phonological word.
As we noted, items like the and for, which are phonologically dependent on adjacent words, are called clitics (see Zwicky and Pullum 1983; Zwicky 1985). Syntactically, clitics pattern like distinct words, but they cannot stand alone phonologically and need to be incorporated into the prosodic structure of an adjacent word, the host.1 Proclitics precede their host and enclitics follow it. Well-known examples of clitics are the contracted form of the English auxiliary verb be (‘m, ‘s, and ‘re), as in Mary’s here or We’re in this together. We know that contracted auxiliaries function just like full words from the point of view of the syntax, because they alternate with full forms that have the same meaning (cf. Mary is here, We are in this together). But phonologically, these auxiliaries are unable to stand on their own.
1 Single-syllable prepositions in English are normally clitics, except at the end of a sentence (e.g. What did you do that for?), a position some prescriptivists find unacceptable.
