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1. Лексикология

1.       LEXICOLOGY

    The term «lexicology» is of Greek origin / from «lexis» - «word» and «logos» - «science»/ .  Lexicology is the part of linguistics which deals with the vocabulary and characteristic features of words and word-groups.

The term «vocabulary» is used to denote the system of words and word-groups that the language possesses.

The term «word» denotes the main lexical unit of a language resulting from the association of a group of sounds with a meaning. This unit is used in grammatical functions characteristic of it. It is the smallest unit of a language which can stand alone as a complete utterance.

The term «word-group» denotes a group of words which exists in the language as a ready-made unit, has the unity of meaning, the unity of syntactical function, e.g. the word-group «as loose as a goose» means «clumsy» and is used in a sentence as a predicative / He is as loose as a goose/.

Lexicology can study the development of the vocabulary, the origin of words and word-groups, their semantic relations and the development of their sound form and meaning. In this case it is called historical lexicology.

Another branch of lexicology is called descriptive and studies the vocabulary at a definite stage of its development.

2. LANGUAGE UNITS

 The main unit of the lexical system of a language resulting  from the association of a group of sounds with a meaning is a word. This unit is used in grammatical functions characteristic of it. It is the smallest language unit which can stand alone as  a complete utterance.

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

3. WORD-BUILDING

Word-building is one of the main ways of enriching vocabulary. There are four main ways of word-building in modern  English: affixation, composition, conversion, abbreviation.  There are also secondary ways of word-building: sound interchange, stress interchange, sound imitation, blends, back formation.