1. How many words are there in the sentence below?

‘The cats talked and the dogs walked.’

How many words are there 7, 6 or 2? (5 points)

All of the three answers are possible depending on how the

question is framed or interpreted by the person.

2. Why 7? (5 points)

According to the Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, a word is a

segment of a printed or written discourse appearing between
spaces. Following this definition, the given sentence is composed
of seven elements that are separated by spaces, namely, “the”,
“cats”, “talked”, “and”, “the”, “dogs”, and “walked”. Thus, the
sentence has seven words.

3. Why 6? (5 points)
If we go by the definition of “word” above, the sentence has seven
words. However, if we focus on how many distinct elements in the
sentence are there, meaning, how many words are there
disregarding any repetition, then there are only six words. Since
“the” is repeated once, only one “the” is counted. Thus, the
sentence has the words “the”, “cats”, “talked”, “and”, “dogs”, and
“walked” without counting the repeated “the”.

4. Why 2? (5 points)

If we focus on how many words in the sentence are found in the

dictionary, then there are only two words. Other than the words
“the” and “and”, the other words like “cats” and “dogs” are in their
plural forms while “talked” and “walked” are both in the past tense.
If we look up “cats”, “dogs”, “talked”, and “walked” in, say for
example, an online dictionary, we will not find these exact words.
Instead, we will only find or be redirected to their basic forms:
“cat”, “dog”, “talk”, and “walk”. Thus, if we only focus on how many
words are in the sentence based on their existence in the
dictionary, there are only two: “the” (without counting the
repetition) and “and”.