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3.0.2.

The conjunct word

A conjunct definition of the Mao Naga word is difficult to formulate either in a gnome or in an extended discourse. What follows is an exposition of this difficulty. None of the putative structural criteria of wordhood viz., Potential Pause, Isolability, Elliptibility, Substitutability and Potential Mobility is both necessary and sufficient so that none of them can singly capture the notion of the Mao Naga word :

3.0.2.1.

Potential Pause

A linguistic chunk which can not be potentially stretched in time in the context of a constitute, not per se, is a word. Thus, a squence like mozü ni to pass want, as in

1.	ai¹	mozü²	ni³	-we⁴
	‘I¹	am⁴	want³	- ing⁴	to pass water²’

can be made discontinuous in terms of a pause between mozü ‘to pass water’ and ni ‘to want’. Hence, mozü ni is to be construed disjunctively i.e., as two words, not conjunctively i.e., as one word. In contrast, the sequence mozü-we ‘to pass water-prog’ can not be made discontinuous in terms of a pause in a sentence like

1a	ai¹	mozü²	we³
	‘I¹	am³	pass² - ing³	water²’

so that mozü-we is to be construed conjunctively i.e. as a constituent with two subconstituents, not disjunctively i.e as two constituents. The phonetic criterion of potential pause has syntactic correlates : a. Interruptibility or Internal Expandability.

Additional, parenthetical linguistic material can interrupt linguistic stretches which can be made discontinuous by potential pause. Thus korü-krü horse-fem ‘female horse ; mare’ can have no pause between its components and hence nothing can interrupt or internally expand korü-krü. korü bo ‘horse’s turds’, on the other hand, is marked by potential pause at the boundary between its constituent components, and hence can be interrupted :

2.	korü¹	kati²	bo³
	‘[the] small²		horse’s¹	turds³’

Compounds would be good examples of absence of potential pause leading to absence of internal expandability. phi-hĩ‘leg-eye [=ankle]’, a compound, is not marked by potential pause at the morpheme boundary and hence is not interruptible or internally not expandable whereas korü hĩ horse eye ‘horse’s eye’ is marked by potential pause and as a result is internally expandable: korü kati hĩ ‘small horse’s eye’. It is to be noted, however, that in Mao, while the presence of potential pause implies or entials interpretability, the absence of potential pause does not imply or entail noninterruptibility. Thus, the sequence kade le meet will ‘will meet’ can not be stretched in time but is interruptible

3.	ai¹	niyi²	kade³	le⁴	‘I¹ will⁴ meet³ you²’
3a.	ai¹	ni-yi²	kade³	ni⁴ le⁵	‘I¹ will5 want⁴ to meet³ you²’

This situation obtains when the elements of the sentence under consideration are both words on criteria other than potential pause.

Interpolated Interrogatability

Linguistic elements whose common boundary is marked by potential pause [i.e. word-sized units] can be addressed by interposing question words which seek, not nonlinguistic information, but an encore linguistic performance. Thus,