since separate sentences, as a rule, are included in a discourse not singly, but in combinations, revealing the corresponding connections of thoughts in communicative progress.
We have surveyed six levels of language, each identified by its own functional type of segmental units. If now we carefully observe the functional status of the level-forming segments, we can distinguish between them more self-sufficient and less self-sufficient types, the latter being defined only in relation to the functions of other level units. Indeed, the phonemic, lexemic and proposemic levels are most strictly and exhaustively identified from the functional point of view: the function of the phoneme is differential, the function of the word is nominative, the function of the sentence is predicative. As different from these, morphemes are identified only as significative components of words, phrases present polynominative combinations of words, and supra-sentential constructions mark the transition from the sentence to the text. p align="justify"> Furthermore, bearing in mind that the phonemic level forms the subfoundation of language, ie the non-meaningful matter of meaningful expressive means, the two notions of grammatical description shall be pointed out as central even within the framework of the structural hierarchy of language: these are, first, the notion of the word and, second, the notion of the sentence. The first is analysed by morphology, which is the grammatical teaching of the word; the second is analysed by syntax, which is the grammatical teaching of the sentence. p align="justify"> II. MORPHEMIC STRUCTURE OF THE WORD
The morphological system of language reveals its properties through the morphemic structure of words. It follows from this that morphology as part of grammatical theory faces the two segmental units: the morpheme and the word. But, as we have already pointed out, the morpheme is not identified otherwise than part of the word; the functions of the morpheme are effected only as the corresponding constituent functions of the word as a whole. p align="justify"> For instance, the form of the verbal past tense is built up by means of the dental grammatical suffix: train-ed [-d]; publish-ed [-t]; meditat-ed [- id].
However, the past tense as a definite type of grammatical meaning is expressed not by the dental morpheme in isolation, but by the verb (ie word) taken in the corresponding form (realised by its morphemic composition) ; the dental suffix is ​​immediately related to the stem of the verb and together with the stem constitutes the temporal correlation in the paradigmatic system of verbal categories
Thus, in studying the morpheme we actual study the word in the necessary details or us composition and functions.
It is very difficult to give a rigorous and at the same time universal definition to the word, ie such a definition as would unambiguously apply to all the different word-units of the lexicon. This difficulty is explained by the fact that the word is an extremely complex and many-sided phenomenon. 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 meaningfully integral and immediately identifiable lingual unit, the uninterrupted string of morphemes, etc., etc. None of these definitions, which can be divided into formal, functional, and mixed, has the power to precisely cover all the lexical segments of language without a residue remaining outside the field of definition. p align="justify"> The said difficulties compel some linguists to refrain from accepting the word as the basic element of language. In particular, American scholars - representatives of Descriptive Linguistics founded by L. Bloomfield - recognised not the word and the sentence, but the phoneme and the morpheme as the basic categories of linguistic description, because these units are the easiest to be isolated in the continual text due to their "physically" minimal, elementary segmental character: the phoneme being the minimal formal segment of language, the morpheme, the minimal meaningful segment. Accordingly, only two segmental levels were originally identified in language by Descriptive scholars: the phonemic level and the morphemic level; later on a third one was added to these - the level of "constructions", ie the level of morphemic combinations.
In fact, if we take such notional words as, say, water, pass, yellow and the like, as well as their simple derivatives, eg watery, passer, yellowness, we shall easily see their definite nominative function and unambiguous segmental delimitation, making them be...
