Part-of-speech meaning

Lexical meaning

Lexical meaning is the realization of the notion by means of a definite language system.

If we compare the word-forms of one and the same word we can observe that besides grammatical meaning they possess another component of word-meaning.

Let us compare, for example the following word-forms: go, goes, went, going, gone. They all have different grammatical meanings of tense, person and aspect, but each of these forms contains one and the same semantic component denoting the process of movement. This is the lexical meaning of the given verb-forms.

So lexical meaning may be described as the component of word-meaning proper to the word as a linguistic unit and recurrent in all the forms of this word.

By lexical meaning we designate the meaning proper to the given linguistic unit in all its forms and distributions, while by grammatical meaning we designate the meaning proper to sets of word-forms common to all words of a certain class.

Both the lexical and grammatical meanings make up the word-meaning as a whole because neither of them can exist without the other. The lexical meaning of a word is dependent upon its grammatical meaning.

Lexical items or words are generally classified into major word-classes such as nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and into minor word-classes such as articles, prepositions, conjunctions and so on.

All members of the same word-class share a distinguishing semantic component which can be viewed asthe lexical component of part-of-speech meaning. The grammatical aspect of part-of-speech meaning is conveyed as a rule by a set of forms. Here we may speak about the meaning of lexico-grammatical groups or classes of words and, consequently, about lexico-grammatical meaning.

A lexico-grammatical class may be defined as a class of lexical elements possessing the same lexico-grammatical meaning and a common system of forms in which the grammatical categories inherent in these units are expressed. So every lexico-grammatical group or class is characterized by its own lexico-grammatical meaning forming the common denomenator of all the meanings of the words which belong to this group. The lexico-grammatical meaning may be also regarded as the feature according to which these words are grouped together.

As it was mentioned above, the lexical meaning of every word depends upon the part of speech to which this word belongs. In the lexical meaning of every separate word the lexico-grammatical meaning common to all the words of the class to which this word belongs is enriched by additional features and becomes particularized.

Let us take, for example, such words as bright, clear, good. These adjectives denote the properties of things capable of being compared and so have degrees of comparison. In the lexical meanings of these words in the forms brighter, clearer and better the lexico-grammatical meaning of qualitative adjectives common to all the words of this class is enriched the additional meaning of the comparative degree of the quality these words denote.

If we describe the word as a noun we mean to say that it is bound to possess a set of forms expressing the grammatical meanings of number, case, sometimes gender and so on. A verb is understood to possess sets of forms expressing the grammatical meanings of tense, aspect, mood and so on.

The part-of-speech meaning of words that possess only one form, for example, prepositions, is observed only in their distribution; compare, for example, to come in and in the table.

One of the levels at which grammatical meaning operates is that of minor word class like articles, prepositions and pronouns.

One criterion for distinguishing these grammatical items from lexical items is in terms of closed and open sets of units.

Grammatical items form closed sets of units usually of small membership, such as articles, prepositions, pronouns. New items are practically never added there.

Lexical items proper belong to open sets of units which have indeterminately large membership; new lexical items which are constantly coined to name new objects of reality are added to these open sets of units.

The interrelation of the lexical and grammatical meanings within the word-meaning and the role played by each of them varies in different word-classes and even in different groups of words within one and the same class. In some parts of speech the prevailing component of the word-meaning is the lexical meaning, in others – the grammatical meaning.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-06