Why WORD is the basic unit of language

Word as a main unit of morphology. Lexical and grammatical aspects of the word. Types of grammatical meanings.

2. Two major types of its meaning – lexical & grammatical and their comparison

The word is the basic unit of the lexical system of a language resulting from the association of a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment (Irina Arnold). As a unit of vocabulary system, the word is also the unity of all its forms and meanings consisting of one or more morphemes. Morphemes are also meaningful elements, but they cannot be used independently. Words can be used as a complete utterance (Ex. Listen! Spring!).

Wоrds are the central elements of language system = we speak in words and not otherwise, because they:

1. are the biggest units of morphology and the smallest of syntax

2. embody the main structural properties and functions of the language (nominative, significative, communicative and pragmatic)

3. can be used in isolation

4. are thought of as having a single referent or represent a concept, a feeling, an action

5. are the smallest units of written discourse: they are marked off by solid spelling

6. segmentation of a sentence into words is easily done by an illiterate speaker, but that of a word into morphemes presents sometimes difficulties even for trained linguists

7. are written as a sequence of letters bounded by spaces on a page (with exceptions)

Word-meaning is not homogeneous; there are several types of meaning.

Grammatical meaning – the abstract meaning of a word that depends on its role in a sentence; varies with the change of word form. Unlike individual and optional lexical meaning grammatical meaning is the meaning of the whole class or a subclass of words obligatory manifested in word forms. Ex. oats and wheat, foliage and leaves: here semantcs contradicts the grammatical meanings of ‘one’ and ‘more than one’. Oats is grammatically plural and wheat is grammatically singular.

Lexical meaning – unlike the grammatical meaning it is identical in all the forms of the word. Both the lexical and the grammatical meaning make up the word-meaning as neither can exist without the other.

Grammatical category is a linguistic category which has the effect of modifying the forms of some class of words in a language.

Notional words, first of all verbs and nouns, possess some morphemic features expressing grammatical meanings. Grammatical meanings are very abstract, very general. Therefore, the grammatical form unites a whole class of words, so that each word of the class ex­presses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its in­dividual, concrete semantics. Ex. the category of number is expressed through an opposition of two forms which render grammatical meanings of “one” and “more than one”.

A paradigm is the system showing a word in all its word-forms (Each part of speech is characterised by a paradigm of its own. Nouns are declined, verbs conjugated, qualitative adjectives have degrees of comparison. Some adverbs also have degrees of comparison). The lexical meaning оf а word is the same throughout the paradigm, i.e. all the word-forms of one and the same word are lexically identical. The grammatical meaning varies from one form to another (Ex.: to take, takes, took, taking or singer, singer’s, singers, singers’).

grammatical opposition.

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