Abstract

In the field of phonology, the concept of ‘word’ has been well-defined in contemporary linguistics. In morphology and syntax, the different existing theories provide a basis for establishing a ‘word’ as well. In graphematics, too, establishing a concept for ‘word’ might appear simple: A graphematic word is the segment sequence between two spaces. But what does this segment-sequence look like? The essay addresses this question in three steps. It begins by discussing the graphematic syllable. It then explains the principle of writing complex words. In German, this may be the prototypical part of graphematic words. For the non-prototypical part, acronyms, abbreviations, punctuation (hyphen, apostrophe, word-level period) and numbers are discussed. The final section is devoted to the interaction between the different concepts of words (phonological, morphological, syntactic and graphematical), and shows that the graphematic word in German is especially determined by morphological and syntactic features.