335 Word as a stratification of formats Raffaele Simone Abstract The paper proposes to view word in terms of a stratification of formats of different nature, partially interacting with each other. A Format in general is an abstract layout of properties, characterizing not a single word but en- tire classes of words. The proposed formats include the Entry Format, the Morphological, Phonological, Seman- tic and Graphematic ones. Entry Format and Semantic Format are discussed in detail, with examples from vari- ous languages. The paper shows how the notion of format may be of use in descriptive as well as typological analysis and also as a solution to leftover problems, like the one of ‘impossible words’. KEYWORDS: word • parts of speech • lexicology • language format 1. Recurring problems in linguistics One of the core epistemological features of linguistics as a discipline is the fact that various of its prob- lems resurface every now and then, even when they seem to have arrived at a generally satisfying solu- tion. This is not a marginal detail since it derives from an inherent property of the discipline. In a pre- vious paper (Simone 2001) I suggested to explain it in terms of the fact that linguistics, in spite of its time-honoured aspiration to be ‘empirical’ and ‘scientific’, is properly a ‘philosophical’ matter (even if its practitioners are seldom philosophers stricto sensu) and it is bound accordingly to face with recurring problems over and over again -- exactly like philosophy. The aim of this paper, however, is not to raise this issue once again, but, more specifically, to resume one of such recurring problems and to propose one more interpretation for it. The problem is no small feat, however: it is about “What is a word?”, a question that has taken various forms and dec- linations over time and that, in spite of the appearances, seems not to have found an acceptably stable answer so far (Ramat 2005, 2016). The case for ‘word’ has been reopened, on the other hand, by the re- cent robust revival of interest towards lexicon, lexicology, and lexical information, and, as an unavoida- ble consequence, towards its core notion, namely word (a survey in Jezek 2016). In this paper I shall decline the answer to the above issue under a slightly different form. I shall not ask “What is a word?” or, to put it otherwise, “How can we define ‘word’?”, but rather “What is a word made of?” I shall claim that it consists of a stratification of ‘formats’ (the core notion of the pa- per) of various nature, interacting with each other in several ways. After presenting and articulating this interpretation I shall say something more in detail on two of such formats, i.e., the Entry Format and the Semantic Format. 2. Which formats stratify in a word The term format has to be understood in its general sense, as a layout of elements and categories that tend to occur together according to a certain pattern. A clear instantiation of such concepts is offered by morphology. The Arabic word, for instance, is typically formed by two discontinuous morphs, a vo- calic and a consonantal one, the former conveying the grammatical information, the latter the lexical one: both interlace according to specific formats. For instance, the meaning of NOUN OF AGENT has to meet the following constraints in order to get expression: