I. Базовые понятия языкознания. Язык как система.

1.1 Уровни языка и изучающие их дисциплины.

1.2. Язык и речь. Парадигматические и синтагматические связи в языке. Язык в синхронии и диахронии.

A language is a hierarchy, a system of units and rules according to which these units can combine. Speech is the act of using a language. A text (oral or written) is the result of speech.

The system of any language includes several levels: phonetic, morphemic, lexical, syntactical (+ suprasyntactical level). Each level comprises units of its own order:

• phonemes (realized in speech as sounds)

• morphemes (realized as morphs)

• lexemes (realized as word forms)

• sentences (realized as utterances)

And each level is studied by a separate branch of linguistics:

• phonetics, phonology

• morphemics, word-building

• lexicology

• grammar

The lexical level can be described as the central level of language and words as the basic units of language: on the one hand, words are made up of phonemes and morphemes; on the other hand, they themselves make up bigger units of speech - sentences and texts.

II. Слово как основная единица лексической системы. Семасиология.

1 Слово как предмет лексикологии. Границы слова.

2 Значение слова. Лексическое и грамматическое значение.

3. Денотативное и коннотативное значение слова.

4. Полисемия. Основные оппозиции в структуре многозначного слова.

5. Причины и типы изменения значения слова.

1. The term lexicology is of Greek origin (from lexis – word and logos - science). Lexicology is the part of linguistics which deals with the vocabulary and characteristic features of words and word-groups.

Lexicology can be general and special. General lexicology is the lexicology of any language, part of General Linguistics. Special lexicology is the lexicology of a particular language (English, German, Russian, etc.).

Unlike a phoneme, a word is a two-facet unit (двухсторонняя единица языка), that has both form and content.

The form (sound form, звуковая оболочка, план выражения) is a certain arrangement of phonemes, a certain arrangement of morphemes and a unifying lexical stress.

The content (content plane, meaning, semantics – значение, план содержания) – consists of gram. and lex. meaning, with which this cluster of phonemes is associated in this given language.

Unlike morpheme, the word is a positionally mobile unit that can occupy different places in the utterance.

Unlike a word combination the word is a global, indivisible unit (глобальная, целостная единица, нерасчленимая). It is indivisible both formally and semantically.

Definition of word by I.V. Arnold:a word is the smallest significant unit of a given language capable of functioning alone and characterised by positional mobility within a sentence, morphological uninterruptability and semantic integrity

The problem of word boundaries

The difference between words and other two-facet units is not always clear. One of the problems is the size-of-unit problem (проблема отдельности слова) that of separateness and separability in the syntagmatic aspect – that is, in the flow of speech.

There are some controversial units of speech

- Form words. On the one hand, they fuse with notional words phonetically and do not function as sentence-members. On the other hand, they are positionally mobile, e.g. a, to, and.

- Loose compounds, e.g. speech sound, stone wall. On the one hand, they are built in speech. On the other hand, they have one lexical stress. And their spelling is double or even triple – it in some cases may be hyphenated, with a space or without a space.

- Phrasal words: his I-love-you‘s. On the one hand, they are built in speech and are not reproducible. On the other, they have one lexical stress.

Another problem connected with the paradigmatic aspect of word boundary is the Identity-of-unit problem (тождества слова).Form & content of different words don’t always form one-to-one relations. They interrelate through phenomena of polysemy, homonymy, synonymy and variants of a word.

Within the language system the word is a lexeme – an abstract unit which unites all its variants, its material realizations in speech (the same as phoneme and speech sounds):

1. lexico-semantic variants – different meanings of the same polysemantic word: to give a pen, to give a smile, to give an answer;

2. phonetic variants – different pronouncation of the same word: neither, either;

3. orthographic variants – different spelling of the same word: jail – gaol;

4. morphological variants – different morphemic structure of the same word: learned – learnt, geographic – geographical.