On the usual syntactic assumption, a word is any maximal chunk of linguistic material exhaustively dominated by a lexical category, X°. The qualification "maximal"here is required to allow compounds as words, since an element, say "black", is normally a word (A°), but not in the compound "blackbird", where "black" is subordinate to the larger word (N°).
- Jensen & Stong-Jensen (2004), a pag.218