On the Idea of a “Word”

During his studies of Serbo-Croatian oral poets that contributed so much to the contemporary understanding of Homer, Albert Lord discovered that the Yugoslavian poets could not grasp the notion of “word.” They thought of language as a stream of sound, and the “units” of language were not distinct words but stock phrases, epithets, units of thought. Analyzing language in terms of their basic kernel units is not a universal phenomenon, and is perhaps peculiarly modern and Western. What would our linguistics look like if we dispensed with this atomistic assumption, and considered language as being composed of recurring phrases and patterns, as composed of a stream of sound rather than a series of distinct linguistic units? What would happen to our poetics if we dispensed with the Flaubertian idea of the “mot juste”? As a writer, I know that I compose sentences; in fact, the unit of writing is as often the paragraph as it is the sentence. How can that figure into our philosophy of language? (No doubt, lots of people have done this, and I’m just ignorant of the literature.)