What is a word?

A word can be described as combination of vocal sounds, or one such sound, used in a language to express an idea, thing, attribute, or relation - and constituting an ultimate minimal element of speech having a meaning. The term is derived from Proto-Germanic and entered Old English via Beowulf. Though we know what we mean by word as the basic element of language, attempts to really define the concept remain controversial. The concept can be looked at on these levels: phonetic-phonological, orthographic-graphemic, morphological, lexical-semantic, and syntactic. Though the essence is made up of three components: acoustic and semantic identity, morphological stability, and syntactic mobility, the word "word" is still subject to terminological differentiation. Some give up and use morpheme or lexeme instead. A lexeme is a minimal, basic abstract unit of the lexicon which may be realized in different grammatical forms, for example: write, writes, wrote, written. Lexeme is used synonymously for word to denote a lexical unit or element of the vocabulary. Morpheme is often described as a theoretical basic element in structural language (and analogous to phoneme), i.e., the smallest meaningful element of language that cannot be reduced into smaller elements. In particular cases, when it is a root or stem with a meaning, morphemes correspond to the grammatical category word. However, affixes are morphemes but not words.

As it is known, the word has been in the centre of studies carried out by a number of scholars. Despite a considerable number of scientific works on this subject the problem of exact and unique definition of the word is still one of the most disputable in modern linguistics. Therefore, the aim of our paper is to make an attempt to outline the basic differences in grammatical and lexical aspects of the word.It is very difficult to give a comprehensive definition of the word and at the same time the one which would unambiguously apply to all the different word-units of the lexicon. M.Y. Blokh admits that within the framework of different linguistic trends and theories the word is defined as the minimal potential sentence, the minimal free linguistic form, the elementary component of the sentence, the articulate sound-symbol, the grammatically arranged combination of sound with meaning, the uninterrupted string of morphemes and so on. But still none of these definitions has the power to precisely cover all the lexical segments of language without a residue remaining outside the field of definition. It is universally recognized that word meaning is not homogeneous, but it is made up of various components, which are described as types of meaning. At the same time all of the mentioned definitions of the word admit the existence of two types of its meaning: grammatical and lexical.

O.S. Akhmanova defineslexical meaning as the realization of notion, emotion or relation by means of the language system. Lexical meaning is a complex thing based on the procedure of reflecting the reality in a person’s mind. It is a specific kind of “content” produced (or engendered) by the reverberation of objective reality in the human consciousness which constitutes the inner structure of linguistic units with respect to which their material form is the outer structure; the material meaning of a word, i.e. the meaning of the main material part of the word, which reflects the concept the given word expresses and the basic properties of the thing (phenomenon, property, state, etc.) the word denotes.

Grammatical meaning is very abstract, very general. Thus, the grammatical form is not confined to an individual word, but unites a whole class of words, so that each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its individual, concrete semantics. Grammatical meaning is a general abstract meaning of classes of words which finds its expression through formal markers thus placing a linguistic unit in a grammatical category or a grammatical class of words (a part of speech).Therefore, the word is a structural and semantic language unit, which serves for naming objects, phenomena, their peculiarities, states and relations; it is an indivisible unit, having its own meaning and function. Lexical meaning of the word is unique for every linguistic unit and is typical not of every unit. On the contrary, grammatical meaning is general and characteristic to a whole class of words; some words (called functional) are devoid of lexical meaning and have only grammatical one.

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