Originally proposed by
Ferdinand de Saussure, "linguistic unit" is a phrase used by
linguists to describe any piece of
linguistic data (that is, something uttered by a speaker) that it makes sense to talk about as a single bit. The beauty of the phrase is that it is
non-specific and so can be used in any subdiscipline from
phonetics to
semantics to
sociolinguistics. Furthermore, it can help avoid using such vague language as "
word", for which there is no agreed-upon definition. The phrase is also very useful in defining concepts like
morpheme: the smallest
linguistic unit that expresses meaning; it seems that without a non-specific term like "linguistic unit" morpheme could not be defined.
For example, the following can be considered linguistic units: