Grammar in the systemic conception of language

MORPHEMIC STRUCTURE OF WORDS
The morphological system of language reveals its properties through the morphemic structure of words. Morphology is a part of grammatical theory, which faces the two segmental units: the morpheme and the word.
The word is a complex and many-sided phenomenon. The word can be 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 its meaning, the uninterrupted string of morphemes, etc. None of these definitions can cover all the lexical segments of language. Let’s point out the properties of the morpheme and the word, which are fundamental from the point of view of their systemic status.
The morpheme is a meaningful segmental component of the word; the morpheme is formed by phonemes; as a meaningful component of the word it is elementary (it is indivisible into smaller segments).
The word is a nominative unit of language; it is formed by morphemes; it enters the lexicon of language as its elementary component; together with other nominative units the word is used for the formation of the sentence – a unit of information in the communication process.
In traditional grammar the study of the morphemic structure of the word was conduced in the light of the two basic criteria:
- positional criterion – the location of the marginal morphemes in relation to the central ones;
- semantic or functional criterion – the correlative contribution of the morphemes to the general meaning of the word.


CATEGORIAL STRUCTURE OF THE WORD
Notional words possess some morphemic features expressing grammatical (morphological) meanings. These features determine the grammatical form of the word.
The grammatical form units a whole class of words. Each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its individual, concrete meaning.
The most general meanings are interpreted in linguistics as categorical grammatical meanings. The categorical meaning (e.g. grammatical number) unites the individual meaning of the correlated paradigmatic forms (e.g. singular – plural).