1. linguistic typology

THE FUNCTIONAL SEMANTIC CATEGORY

The concept of the functional-semantic category is connected with the cross-level description of the system of a certain language. While distinguishing these categories A.V.Bondarko starts with «a partial commonness of semantic functions of language elements (existence of semantic invariant despite the diversity of variants).
The functional-semantic category has the content and expression plans. The se­mantic content is identified with the meaning of morphological categories (such as the verbal aspect, tense, person and mood). «The expression plan is formed by language means related to different levels of language hierarchy and aspects of language”: morphological, syntactic, word-formation, lexical, various combinations of means in the context)⁴⁰.
What is important is that the functional - semantic categories A.V. Bondarko bases on the morphological categories which are looked at as a starting point.
Units of other levels arc defined as means, cooperating with morphological units on the basis of partial semantic coincidence. On this basis A.V.Bondarko identifies a number of the functional-semantic categories such as temporality, modality, person­ality, aspect and others. The above categories are expressed by cross-level units of the language: morphological, lexical and syntactic.
The functional-semantic categories can be successfully applied in comparative typological research. The concept of functional-semantic categories can be applied in comparative studies as it represents a reliable basis for cross-language compari­sons.
The functional-semantic categories are developed on the strong logic basis, and theoretical positions developed by A.V.Bondarko and can serve a specific meta-lan-guage while describing not only a system of one concrete language, but they can also be applied in typological researches.
The functional-semantic categories constitute certain fields and in many senses they coincide with the concept of grammatical-lexical fields existing in linguistics.

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