D. V. Demidov

Questions for Reflection: 
1. Why is the language considered to be a systematic 
phenomenon?
2. What basic subsystems is each language subdivided 
into? What do they study? 
3. What segmental and supra-segmental units of the 
language do you know? 
4. What is a hierarchy of levels that segmental lingual 
units form? 
5. Why do we have to stratify language and speech?
6. What are two fundamental types of relations between 
lingual units? Can you describe them? 

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Topic 2. Basic Grammatical and Morphological Notions. 
 
Questions for Discussion:  
1. Grammatical meaning and the means of its expression.
2. Grammatical form and its types. 
3. The study of the grammatical category and its kinds.
4. The theory and types of morphological oppositions.
5. The concept of the morpheme and its structural types.
6. The notion of the word and its morphemic structure. 
1. Grammatical meaning and the means of its 
expression. 
The grammatical meaning is the essential part of a 
grammatical category, which is defined as a unity of a 
grammatical meaning and a morphological way of its expression. 
The peculiarities of the grammatical meaning are especially 
evident in comparison with the lexical meaning.
Lexical meaning is the individual meaning of the word 
(e.g.: table). Grammatical meaning is the meaning of the whole 
class or a subclass. For example, the class of nouns has the 
grammatical meaning of thingness. If we take a noun (table) we 
may say that it possesses its individual lexical meaning (it 
corresponds to a definite piece of furniture) and the grammatical 
meaning of thingness (this is the meaning of the whole class). 
Besides, the noun ‗table‘ has the grammatical meaning of a 
subclass – countableness. 
There are some classes of words that are devoid of any 
lexical meaning and possess the grammatical meaning only. This 
can be explained by the fact that they have no referents in the 
objective reality. All function words belong to this group – 
articles, particles, prepositions, etc. 

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Thus, grammatical meaning is an abstract, generalized 
meaning, typical of large groups of words and formally expressed 
by inflexions or zero inflexions in opposition.
According to the way of expression the grammatical 
meaning can be explicit and implicit. The implicit grammatical 
meaning is not expressed formally (e.g. the word table does not 
contain any hints in its form as to it being inanimate). The explicit 
grammatical meaning is always marked morphologically – it has 
its marker. In the word cats the grammatical meaning of plurality 
is shown in the form of the noun; cat‘s – here the grammatical 
meaning of possessiveness is shown by the form ‗s; is asked – 
shows the explicit grammatical meaning of passiveness. [6, p. 43] 
The implicit grammatical meaning may be of two types – 
general and dependent. The general grammatical meaning is the 
meaning of the whole word-class, of a part of speech (e.g. nouns – 
the general grammatical meaning of thingness). The dependent 
grammatical meaning is the meaning of a subclass within the 
same part of speech. 
The 2nd classification of the grammatical meaning is 
based on the attitude to objective reality and can be extralingual 
and