1. Lexical context

determines the meaning of a word by lexical meanings of surrounding words

Black denotes colour when used with the words naming some material or thing: black velvet, black gloves.

When used with words denoting feeling or thought, it means 'sad', 'dismal‘: black thoughts, black despair

With nouns denoting time, the meaning is 'unhappy', 'full of hardships‘: black days, black period.

2. Syntactic context

has the indicative power in the syntactic pattern

To make means 'to cause' when followed by a complex object:

I couldn't make him understand a word I said.

3. Mixed context

Late, when used predicatively, means 'after the right, expected fixed time: be late for school.

When used attributively with words denoting periods of time, it means 'towards the end of the period', in late summer.

Used attributively with proper personal nouns and preceded with a definite article, means 'recently dead‘ late Mr. Brown

4. Speech situation as context (text-situation and life-situation)

the necessary indication comes not from within the sentence but from some part of the text outside it.

When comparing the two approaches in terms of methods of linguistic analysis we see that the functional approach should not be considered an alternative, but rather a valuable complement to the referential theory. It is only natural that linguistic investigation must start by collecting an adequate number of samples of contexts. There is absolutely no need to set the two approaches against each other; each handles its own side of the problem and neither is complete without the other.

3. Synonymic rows. Types of connotations (seme analysis).

Synonymy - is the semantic relation that holds between two words that can (in a given context) express the same meaning. Antrushina said that Synonymy is one of modern linguistics' most controversial problems.

A synonym is a word that has the same or nearly the same meaning as another word.

English is rich in synonyms for the historical reason; its vocabulary is made up of Anglo-Saxon words on one hand and of French, Latin and Greek on the other.

The native words are often shorter and stylistically neutral, while French borrowings are literary and Latin/Greek - learned:

belly – stomach – abdomen

to end - to finish - to complete

buy and purchase,

Lexical synonyms are different words 1) of the same part of speech having the same grammatical distribution, which 2) have some common denotational components of meaning, but 3) differ either in some denotational component(s) or in some connotational components of meaning and thus usually have different lexical valency.

Types of synonyms by V.S. Vinogradov

1. Ideographic or denotational: the difference in the meaning concerns the notion expressed:

change (become or make different) – alter – vary (undergo change or change something within a range of possibilities);

understand - realize;

to walk - to pace - to stroll - to stride.

Ideographic-stylistic synonyms have the same denotational components but differ in connotational components of meaning:

imitate - monkey;

terrible – horrible - atrocious.

intelligent -shrewd - clever - bright - sagacious;