4. General characteristics of linguistic units.

Language is regarded as a system of elements (signs, units) such as sounds, words, etc. These elements have no value without each other, they depend on each other, they exist only in a system, and they are nothing without a system. System implies the characterization of a complex object as made up of separate parts (e.g. the system of sounds). Language is a structural system.

Units of language are divided into:

1) segmental (phonemes, which form phonemic strings of various status – syllables, morphemes, words, etc.)

2) suprasegmental (intonations, (intonation contours), accents, pauses, patterns of word-order).

The segmental units of language form a hierarchy of levels where units of any higher level are formed of units of the immediately lower level (morphemes are decomposed into phonemes, words are decomposed into morphemes, phrases are decomposed into words, etc).

1) The lowest level of lingual segments is phonemic (phonological). The phonemic level unit is the phoneme. The phoneme has no meaning, its function is differential (a distinctive unit bag – back). Since phoneme has no meaning, it is not a sign.

Units of all the higher levels of language are meaningful; they may be called ‘signemes’ as opposed to phonemes.

2) The level located above the phonemic one is the morphemic (morphological). The unit of this level is the morpheme (the elementary meaningful part of the word: teach – teacher). The morpheme expresses abstract, ‘significative’ meanings which are used as constituents for the formation of more concrete, ‘nominative’(naming) meanings of words.

3) The third level is the lexemic level. Its level unit is the word. The word names things and their relations so it is a directly naming (nominative) unit of language. This kind of nomination effected by separate words can be called ‘mononomination’.

4) The next level is phrasemic level (the level of phrases/word-groups). Its level unit is the word-group (notional phrases) – a combination of two or more notional words which has a nominative function. These combinations represent the referent of nomination as a complicated phenomenon (a concrete thing, an action, a quality, a whole situation): a picturesque village; to start with a jerk; extremely difficult; the unexpected arrival of the chief. This kind of nomination can be called ‘polynomination’.

Notional phrases may be of two types:

1. stable (phraseological units) form the phraseological part of the lexicon, and are studied by the phraseological division of lexicology.

2. free which are built up in the process of speech on the existing productive models. They are studied in the lower division of syntax.

The grammatical description of phrases is sometimes called ‘smaller syntax’ (while ‘larger syntax’ studies the sentence and its textual connections).

5) The next level is called ‘proposemic’ (the level of sentences). Its unit is the sentence. The peculiarity of the sentence (proposeme) is that naming a certain situation, or situational event, it expresses predication (the relation of the denoted event to reality). It shows whether this event is real or unreal, desirable or obligatory, stated as a truth or asked about, etc.

6) There is still another level – supra-proposemic/dictemic (dicteme – utterance) level or the level of sentence-groups (supra-sentential constructions – a combination of separate sentences forming a textual unity or an elementary topical segmental unit of the continual text). The syntactic process by which sentences are connected into textual unities is analysed under the heading of ‘cumulation’. The functions of the dicteme are nomination, predication, topicalization (it builds up a topical stretch of some text), and stylization.

In the typed text, the supra-sentential construction commonly coincides with the paragraph. However, unlike the paragraph, this construction can be realised not only in a written text, but also in all the varieties of oral speech.

To sum up: since the phonemic level forms the subfoundation of language the two notions of grammatical description shall be pointed out as central: the notion of the word and the notion of the sentence. The first is analysed by morphology – the grammatical teaching of the word – which deals with the internal structure of words, peculiarities of their grammatical categories and their semantics; the second is analysed by syntax – the grammatical teaching of the sentence – which deals with the rules governing combination of words in sentences (and texts in modern linguistics).