The word as a basic unit of the language

The term word denotes the main lexical unit of the language. The word is a speech unit which services the purposes of human communication. Many scholars tried to define the word as a linguistic phenomenon. It is the most difficult task of lexicology. We can only describe the word.

1. The word has a sound form. It consists of phonemes.

2. The word consists of morphemes. When an affix is added a new word is formed. It is the external structure of the word.

3. The word has one or several meanings. The internal structure of the word is its semantic structure.

4. In sentences words are syntactically organized. Each word has its position in the sentence and semantics function (it is part of the sentence).

5. The word can be used as a sentence (повелительное предложение). “Listen!”

6. The word has formal unity. We can’t change the position of the morphemes or insert anything between the elements of the word without changing its meaning. “a lion” – it’s a word group because we can insert other words (“a big lion”, “a death lion”), “alive” – it’s a word because we can’t insert anything.

7. The word has semantic unity. It denotes one concept. “a black bird” – it is a word group because each word denotes a separate concept: “black” denotes color and “bird” denotes a living creature. We can insert other words, we can change each word in the word group. “a blackbird” – дрозд – it is a word because it denotes one concept: the type of the bird. We can’t insert anything, we can only change the whole word.

8. The word has its paradigm – it’s the system of grammatical forms of the word. In speech the word functions in one of its forms. E.g. “nice” – “nicer” – “the nicest”, “look” – “looked” – “looked” – “looking”, “go” – “went” – “gone” – “going”.

Thus, the word is a speech unit used for the purposes of human communication, it represents a group of sounds has meaning and the system of grammatical forms and it is characterized by formal and semantic unity. It is the unity of form and content.

The morphological structure of the English word

The word is not the smallest unit of the language. It consists of morphemes. The term “morpheme” comes from Greek “morphe” which means “form” and suffix “eme” which means the smallest unit. The morpheme is the smallest unit which has the sound form and meaning. Morphemes can’t be divided into smaller units without losing the meaning. They are parts of the word and can’t function in speech independently.

Structure of classification of the morphemes

Structurally morphemes can be divided into free and bound.

A form is called free when it can be used alone without changing its meaning (as a word).

A form is called bound when it can’t be used alone - “(black)(berry)” – ежевика, “(black)(bird)”, “(cran)(berry)” – клюква, “(rasp)(berry) - малина”, “perceive” – воспринимать.

The words consisting of bound morphemes only are borrowed words.

Semantic classification of the morphemes

From the semantic point of view and the role they play in the constructing of words the morphemes may be root and affixational. The root morphemes carry the lexical meaning of the word and make its semantic center. The roots are the most numerous morphemes. The affixational morphemes form new words from the words already existing in the language. According to their position in the word affixational morphemes can be divided into: prefixes, suffixes and inflections (functional morphemes).

Prefix comes before the root morpheme. Suffix comes after the root morpheme. Inflections carry only grammatical meaning.

According to the number of the morphemes the words can be monomorphic and polymorphic. Monomorphic words consist of only one root morpheme (“a dog”, “small”). Polymorphic words consist of several morphemes (“customer”).