2 Types of lexical units. The notion of lexical system.

The term unit means one of the elements into which a whole may be divided or analysed and which possesses the basic properties of this whole.

The units of a vocabulary or lexical units are two-facet elements possessing form and meaning.

The basic unit forming the bulk of the vocabulary is the word.

3 Word as the main lexical unit

It is significant that many scholars have attempted to define the word as a linguistic phenomenon. Yet none of the definitions can be considered totally satisfactory in all aspects.

First, we do know that the word is a unit of speech, which serves the purposes of human communication. Thus, the word can be defined as a unit of communication.

Secondly, the word can be defined as the total of the sounds, which comprise it.

Third, the word, viewed structurally, possesses several characteristics.

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.

All these morphemes constitute the external structure of the word post-impressionists.

The internal structure of the word, or its meaning, is nowadays commonly referred to as the word's semantic structure. This is certainly the word's main aspect. Words can serve the purposes of human communication solely due to their meanings.

Another structural aspect of the word is its unity. The word possesses both external (or formal) unity and semantic unity. Formal unity of the word is sometimes inaccurately interpreted as indivisibility.

The example of post-impressionists has already shown that the word is not, strictly speaking, indivisible. Yet, its component morphemes are permanently linked together in opposition to word-groups, both free and with fixed contexts, whose components possess a certain structural freedom, e. g. bright light, to take for granted.

A further structural feature of the word is its susceptibility to grammatical employment. In speech most words can be used in different grammatical forms in which their interrelations are realised.

Words are the central elements of language system, they face both ways: they are the biggest units of morphology and the smallest of syntax", and what is more, they embody the main structural properties and functions of the language.

Other units are morphemes that is parts of words, into which words may be analysed, and set expressions or groups of words into which words may be combined.

A word, however, can be divided into smaller sense units - morphemes.

Words can be separated in an utterance by other such units and can be used in isolation. Unlike words, morphemes cannot be divided into smaller meaningful units and are functioning in speech only as constituent parts of words. The meaning of morphemes is more abstract and more general than that of words and at the same time they are less autonomous.

The morpheme is the smallest meaningful language unit. The morpheme consists of a class of variants, allomorphs, which are either phonologically or morphologically conditioned, e.g. please, pleasant, pleasure.

Morphemes are divided into two large groups: lexical morphemes and grammatical (functional) morphemes. Both lexical and grammatical morphemes can be free and bound.

Free lexical morphemes are roots of words, which express the lexical meaning of the word; they coincide with the stem of simple words.

Free grammatical morphemes are function words: articles, conjunctions and prepositions ( the, with, and).

Bound lexical morphemes are affixes: prefixes (dis-), suffixes (-ish) and also blocked (unique) root morphemes (e.g. Fri-day, cran-berry).

Bound grammatical morphemes are inflexions (endings), e.g. -s for the Plural of nouns, -ed for the Past Indefinite of regular verbs, -ing for the Present Participle, -er for the Comparative degree of adjectives.

Set expressions are word groups consisting of two or more words whose combination is integral so that they are introduced into speech as ready-made units with a specialised meaning of the whole that is not understood as a mere sum total of the meanings of the elements.

So the definition of the word: a word is the smallest significant unit of a given language, capable of functioning alone, and characterized by: