1. Subject Matter of Lexicology and Its Main Types (General; Special; Descriptive; Historical; Comparative).

Lexicology is the part of linguistics which deals with the vocabulary and characteristic features of words and word-groups. Is the brunch of linguistics of linguistics has it’s own aims and methods.

The term «vocabulary» is used to denote the system of words and word-groups that the language possesses. Lexicology can study the development of the vocabulary, the origin of words and word-groups, their semantic relations and the development of their semantic structure, change of meaning.

General Lexicology is a part of General linguistics which studies the general properties of words, the specific features of words of any particular language. It studies the pecularities of words common to all the languages.

Special Lexicology deals with the words of a definite language. Ex.: English Lexicology', Russian Lexicology, Uzbek Lexicology and so on.

Descriptive Lexicology studies the words at a synchronic aspect. It is concerned with the vocabulary of a language as they exist at the present time.

Historical or diachronic Lexicology deals with the development of the vocabulary and the changes it has undergone. For example. In descriptive Lexicology the words «to take», «to adopt» are considered as being English not differing from such native words as «child», «foot», «stone» etc. But in historical Lexicology they are treated as borrowed words.

Comparative Lexicology deals with the properties of the vocabulary of two or more languages. In comparative Lexicology the main characteristic features of the words of two or more languages are compared. For example. Russian-English Lexicology, English French Lexicology and etc.

2. Lexicology and Its Links with Other Branches of Linguistics, Applied Branches of Lexicology.

1) Lexicology is closely connected with phonetics because they have the same object of studies, they both studies the word, but phonetics studies the outer form and lexicology studies the inner form of the word.

2) Lexicology is connected with grammar because lexicology studies words and grammar studies the grammatical relations between words and how words are combined into phrases and sentences. Meaningful communication is not possible without knowing the grammar rules.

3) Lexicology is connected with the history of language because the history of language studies the changes and the development of the vocabulary in the course of time.

4) Lexicology is connected with stylistics because stylistics studies the differentiation of the vocabulary according to the sphere of communication.

5) Lexicology is connected with the sociolinguistics because sociolinguistics studies the extra linguistic and social causes of the changes in the vocabulary of a language.

3. Concept and Word.

The lexical meaning of a word is not only its direct (or indirect) correlation with the displayed concrete (or abstract) object. The meaning of a word (i.e., its semantic structure) reflects both general subject-logical connections, and relations with the lexical meanings of other words of a given (or close) lexical paradigm, and the boundaries of lexical compatibility, and the nature of lexical and grammatical attribution (that is why dictionaries indicate the part of speech to which the word being defined belongs, as well as general formalcategorical meanings), and the emotional-expressive properties inherent in the word.

4. Word as the Main Unit of Language and Speech. The Principal Characteristics of a Word.

The word is the basic unit of language system, the largest on the morphologic and the smallest on the syntactic plane of linguistic analysis. The word is a structural and semantic entity within the language system.

The modern approach to word studies is based on distinguishing between the external and the internal structures of the word. By external structure of the word we mean its morphological structure. For example, in the word post-impressionists the following morphemes can be distinguished: the prefixes post-, im-, the root press, the noun-forming suffixes - ion, -ist, and the grammatical suffix of plurality -s. The internal structure of the word, or its meaning, is nowadays commonly referred to as the word's semantic structure.

Another structural aspect of the word is its unity. The word possesses both external (or formal) unity and semantic unity. The formal unity of the word can be best illustrated by comparing a word and a word-group comprising identical constituents. The difference between a blackbird and a black bird is best explained by their relationship with the grammatical system of the language. The word blackbird, which is characterized by unity, possesses a single grammatical framing: blackbird/s. The first constituent black is not subject to any grammatical changes. In the word-group a black bird each constituent can acquire grammatical forms of its own.The same example may be used to illustrate what we mean by semantic unity. In the word-group a black bird each of the meaningful words conveys a separate concept: bird — a kind of living creature; black — a colour. The word blackbird conveys only one concept: the type of bird. This is one of the main features of any word: it always conveys one concept, no matter how many component morphemes it may have in its external structure. Words may have phonetic, graphic and morphological variants:

often – [Þfən]/[ Þftən] – phonetic variants birdy/birdie – graphic variants

phonetic/phonetical – morphological variants