Speech and language disorders

Although the ordinary speaker is acutely word-conscious and usually finds no difficulty either in isolating words from an utterance or in identifying them in the process of communication, the precise linguistic definition of a word is far from easy to state; no exhaustive definition of the word has yet been given by linguists.The word as well as any linguistic sign is a two-facet unit possessing both form and content or, to be more exact, soundform and meaning. Neither can exist without the other. In other languages it is not a word, but a meaningless sound-cluster.When used in actual speech the word undergoes certain modification and functions in one of its forms.
Mode
English Lexicology aims at giving a systematic description of the word-stock of Mode
English. Words, their component parts - morphemes - and various types of word-groups, are subjected to structural and semantic analysis. In other words, Mode
English Lexicology investigates the problems of word-structure and word-formation in Mode
English, the semantic structure of English words, the main principles underlying the classification of vocabulary units into various groupings the laws gove
ing the replenishment of the vocabulary with new vocabulary units.
It also studies the relations existing between various lexical layers of the English vocabulary and the specific laws and regulations that gove
its development at the present time.There are obvious differences between speech as opposed to language, which have been insufficiently attended to and inadequately accounted for in contemporary linguistics. It is most noteworthy that there seem to be some differences not only in the performance, but also in the systems underlying speech vs. language. That is, language and speech have partly different standards of their own. For one thing, the substantial content of the linguistic rules is not quite the same for the two media. Secondly, the impact of norms seems to be different. In the dynamic interaction...

By way of conclusion, the study of linguistic performance is certainly not linguistically uninteresting and must be pursued if we want to understand the true nature of language and speech. It is necessary to consider speech and language as two different media, each with its own characteristics which are worth while investigating.
"When words and sentences are written down, they can be readily looked upon as objects" (Johnson-Laird, 1980:204).
Speech consists of transient, dynamic behavior distributed and limited in time. The transience of the products of the activities of utterance production and comprehension make a process oriented approach seem natural. In other words, we should focus on the behavioral activities themselves. The interpretation of linguistic behavior is heavily dependent on an on-line interaction with background knowledge, non-verbal signals and various other features of the situational context. Language units, on the other hand, consist of permanent object-like products which tend to be relatively autonomous, explicit, and subject to less variation than speech. It is quite obvious that the linguists' conception of language structure and linguistic items squares rather well with the latter phenomena, whereas its adequacy for the analysis of language and dynamic speech behavior is hardly beyond dispute.
The view that a language consists of a set of thing-like products is a recurrent theme in the linguistic literature. One of the most well-known definitions is the following:
“From now on I will consider a language to be-a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length and constructed out of a finite set of elements.” (Chomsky 1975:13). Johnson-Laird (1980:204) summarize "the premise of objectivist linguistics from its origins in antiquity to the present" as follows:
"Linguistic expressions are objects that have properties in and of themselves and stand in fixed relationships to one another, independently of any person who speaks...