English

Noun

wordness

1. The quality of being a word or words.
   • c. 1975–1984, Charles Bernstein, “Three or Four Things I Know about Him” (essay), in Content’s Dream: Essays 1975–1984, Northwestern University Press (2001), ISBN 9780810118454, page 32:

     The move from purely descriptive, outward directive, writing toward writing centered on its wordness, its physicality, its haecceity (thisness) is, in its impulse, an investigation of human self-sameness, […]

   • 1980, Gaurinath Bhattacharyya Shastri, A study in the dialectics of Sphoṭa, page 11:

     Now, word-ness pertains to all words and is, therefore, regarded as a class (jati) and, so, it is said to be eternal.

   • 1988–1989, Brain and reading: structural and functional anomalies in developmental dyslexia with special reference to hemispheric interactions, memory functions, linguistic processes, and visual analysis in reading : proceedings of the 7th International Rodin Remediation Conference at the Wenner-Gren Center, Stockholm and Uppsala University, June 19-22, 1988, page 89:

     Accuracy revealed a classic overall RVFA, an overall advantage of words over nonwords and an overall wordness [...]

   • 1993, Ulla E. Dydo, A Stein Reader, Northwestern University Press, ISBN 978-0-8101-1083-0, page 314:

     (Here for once she even includes a word butchered of its wordness to make possible the dreadful rhyme “trois/wha.”)

   • 1995, Fran Zaidel, "Interhemispheric Transfer in the Split Brain: Long-term Status Following Complete Cerebral Commissurotomy", chapter 17 of Richard J. Davidson and Kenneth Hugdahl (editors), Brain Asymmetry, MIT Press (1998), ISBN 978-0-262-54079-7, page 492:

     […] some independent stimulus variable (e.g., Wordness [words, nonwords] in a lexical decision task or Decision [global, local] in a hierarchic perception task) […]

   • 1996, José J. Cañas and María Teresa Bajo, Automatic and Strategic Processes in Lexical Access, in Language processing in Spanish, edited by Manuel Carreiras, José E. García-Albea, Núria Sebastián-Gallés, page 76:

     For example, it is possible that when many strong targets are introduced in the list, only strong relations are taken as evidence of wordness, whereas when many related pairs are included, both weak and strong relations would be taken as evidence of wordness.

   • 2008, Zvia Breznitz, Brain research in language, page 165:

     McLaughlin, Osterhout, and Kim (2004), for example, used the known sensitivity of the N400 to semantic relationships and lexicality (or wordness – the property of a string of letters representing an actual word) [...]

Quotations

• 1994, J. Paul Hunter, “From Typology to Type: Agents of Change in Eighteenth-Century English Texts”, in Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (editors), Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body, University of Michigan Press (1994), ISBN 978-0-472-08257-5, page 57:

  Modern writing, Pope argues in the very first line of the poem, is inspired by the “Smithfield Muses,” who replace the logos, the wordness, of true poetry with an art based on technological gimmickry […]

• 1995, Rey Chow, Primitive passions, page 185:

  Hence it is words — in their wordness, their literality — rather than sentences, that matter the most in translation. A real translation, Benjamin writes, "may be achieved, above all, by a literal rendering of the syntax

• 2010, Reading Chinese Script: A Cognitive Analysis, edited by Jian Wang, Albrecht W. Inhoff, Hsuan-Chih Chen, page 252:

  Four conditions were included in the wordness variable: word/sentence, word/nonsentence, nonword/nonsentence, and neutral.

See also

• wordhood