2. Two major types of its meaning lexical & grammatical and their comparison
The word is the basic unit of the lexical system of a language resulting from the association of a particular meaning with a particular group of sounds capable of a particular grammatical employment (Irina Arnold). As a unit of vocabulary system, the word is also the unity of all its forms and meanings consisting of one or more morphemes. Morphemes are also meaningful elements, but they cannot be used independently. Words can be used as a complete utterance (Ex. Listen! Spring!).
W rds are the central elements of language system = we speak in words and not otherwise, because they:
1. are the biggest units of morphology and the smallest of syntax
2. embody the main structural properties and functions of the language (nominative, significative, communicative and pragmatic)
3. can be used in isolation
4. are thought of as having a single referent or represent a concept, a feeling, an action
5. are the smallest units of written discourse: they are marked off by solid spelling
6. segmentation of a sentence into words is easily done by an illiterate speaker, but that of a word into morphemes presents sometimes difficulties even for trained linguists
7. are written as a sequence of letters bounded by spaces on a page (with exceptions)
Word-meaning is not homogeneous; there are several types of meaning.
Grammatical meaning the abstract meaning of a word that depends on its role in a sentence; varies with the change of word form. Unlike individual and optional lexical meaning grammatical meaning is the meaning of the whole class or a subclass of words obligatory manifested in word forms. Ex. oats and wheat, foliage and leaves: here semantcs contradicts the grammatical meanings of one and more than one. Oats is grammatically plural and wheat is grammatically singular.
Lexical meaning unlike the grammatical meaning it is identical in all the forms of the word. Both the lexical and the grammatical meaning make up the word-meaning as neither can exist without the other.
Grammatical category is a linguistic category which has the effect of modifying the forms of some class of words in a language.
Notional words, first of all verbs and nouns, possess some morphemic features expressing grammatical meanings. Grammatical meanings are very abstract, very general. Therefore, the grammatical form unites a whole class of words, so that each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its individual, concrete semantics. Ex. the category of number is expressed through an opposition of two forms which render grammatical meanings of one and more than one.
A paradigm is the system showing a word in all its word-forms (Each part of speech is characterised by a paradigm of its own. Nouns are declined, verbs conjugated, qualitative adjectives have degrees of comparison. Some adverbs also have degrees of comparison). The lexical meaning f word is the same throughout the paradigm, i.e. all the word-forms of one and the same word are lexically identical. The grammatical meaning varies from one form to another (Ex.: to take, takes, took, taking or singer, singers, singers, singers).
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grammatical opposition.
Grammatical classes of words.
The words of language, depending on various formal and semantic features, are divided into grammatically relevant sets or classes. The traditional grammatical classes of words are called "parts of speech". Since the word is distinguished not only by grammatical, but also by semantico-lexemic properties, some scholars refer to parts of speech as "lexico-grammatical" series of words, or as "lexico-grammatical categories" []. There are Notional (noun, adjective, numeral, pronoun, verb, adverb) and Functional (article, preposition, conjunction, particle, modal word, interjection) parts of speech.
Types of Grammatical Meaning
1. Implicit and explicit
2. Implicit meanings: general and dependant
3. ReferentialandRelational
The implicit grammatical meaning is not expressed formally:
the word table does not contain any hints in its form as to it being inanimate.
The explicit grammatical meaning is always marked morphologically (has its marker).
The general grammatical meaning is the meaning of the whole word-class, of a part of speech.
nouns have the general grammatical meaning of thingness
The dependent grammatical meaning is the meaning of a subclass within the same part of speech which influences the realization of grammatical categories restricting them to a subclass.
countability/uncountability - the category of number
animateness/inanimateness - the category of case,
teminativeness/non-terminativeness - the category of tense,
transitivity/intransitivity the category of voice.
Referential which reflect objective properties of real phenomena (quantity, time, etc)
Relational (syntactic) which serve to combine words into phrases and sentences
Verbal number and person
Gender and number of Russian adjectives
Smirnitsky's Distinctive Features of a Grammatical Category
1. Any grammatical category must be represented by, at least, two grammatical forms (grammatical forms are limited in number and regular).
the Category of case in English is represented by the opposition of two forms (Common - Possessive), in Russian - 6 forms.
2. No grammatical category can be represented by all the word forms of the word. If some grammatical meaning is inherent in all the word forms of the given word, we shall deal here not with a grammatical category but with lexico-grammatical category.
the Category of Gender in Russian.
3. One word form can combine different grammatical categories.
the form "speaks" expresses meanings of 5 categories: tense, person, number, mood, voice.
4. No word form can combine 2 categorial meanings (grammatical meanings of the same category).
5. Every word form must represent at least one categorial form or belong to some grammatical category. There are no word forms without grammatical categories.
6. Grammar studies categories of different types, most familiar of which are morphological grammatical categories.
the English verb is the most developed system of them. It has 6-8 morphological categories.
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Types of Categories
According to the relation to the objective reality:
