 We can distinguish two fundamental approaches to the notion of word. On one side, we have linguistic approaches, which characterize the notion of word by reflecting on its explanatory role in linguistic research (for a survey on explanation in linguistics, see Egré 2015). These approaches often end up splitting the notion of word into a number of more fine-grained and theoretically manageable notions, but still tend to regard ‘word’ as a term that zeroes in on a scientifically respectable concept (e.g., Di Sciullo &amp; Williams 1987). For example, words are the primary locus of stress and tone assignment, the basic domain of morphological conditions on affixation, clitization, compounding, and the theme of phonological and morphological processes of assimilation, vowel shift, metathesis, and reduplication (Bromberger 2011).