Synonymy, antonymy.

Synonymy is understood as semantic equivalence existing between words and word-groups (Jill is younger than Jack is semantically equivalent to Jack is older than Jill; to win a victory - to gain a victory). So we may define synonyms as words different in their sound-form, but similar in their denotational meaning or meanings and interchangeable at least in some contexts. There are several patterns of synonymic sets in English. Double-scale patterns - native and Latin (brotherly - fraternal) or native and Greek or French, . Triple-scale patterns - native, French and Latin or Greek. We may regard euphemisms as a source of synonymy too. Euphemisms are words with more pleasant connotational component of meaning substituting the words of the same denotational meaning but having less pleasant or offensive connotation. Paronyms are sometimes taken as words identical in their sound-form and meaning (to affect: to influence - to effect: to result in). Traditionally antonyms are defined as words that have opposite meanings. Generally we may divide antonyms into 2 groups: absolute and derivational. where opposition is gradual (cold (cool) - (warm) hot; large - little or small), complementaries having a binary opposition (dead-alive. ). Derivational antonyms may be affixal (happy-unhappy, logical-illogical) or suffixal (hopeful - hopeless).

Phraseology.

Most Russian scholars use the term phraseological unit. Most western scholars use the term idiom. . According to the type of motivation by Vinogradov three groups of phraseological units were suggested: phraseological fusions, phraseological unities, and collocations. N.N. Amosova’s approach is contextual. Units are divided into phrasemes and idioms.

Morphological structure of the english words.

Like a word, a morpheme is an association of a certain meaning with a certain sound-form; unlike a word, morpheme is not an autonomous unit and can occur in speech only as a constitutive part of a word although a word may consist of a single morpheme. Morphemes may be classified semantically or structurally. Semantically morphemes fall into root-morphemes being the lexical nucleus of a word and affixational morphemes possessing the part-of-speech meaning (prefixes and suffixes). ]. According to their function affixational morphemes fall into inflectional and derivational. According to their position derivational morphemes are classified into prefixes and suffixes. There are two levels of approach to the study of word-structure: the level of morphemic analysis and the level of derivational or word-formation analysis. Morphemic analysis shows the number of morphemes which make up a word. To show the way a word was formed, it is necessary to use word-formation (derivational) analysis. From the point of view of the word-formation structure, words can be divided into non-motivated and motivated. Non-motivated words, or simplexes, are simple, not derived words which serve for the formation of new words (hand, come; anxious, public). From the point of view of word-formation analysis, all single-root (monoradical) words are simple, non-motivated words. Motivated words, or complexes, have motivated stems of different types: derived, compound, compound-derived. A derived stem is a stem containing one or more affixes. A compound stem is present, e.g., in the word horsemanship. The stem horseman is a compound one, for it is derived from two other stems: horse and man.