THE PROBLEM OF DEFINITION OF WORDS AS THE BASIC UNIT OF LAN-GUAGE AND THE FEATURES OF LEXICAL SEMANTICS

The subject of this study is the word as the basic unit of language and features of its semantics. The aim of the research was to study the scientific works of famous linguists of the classical and modern schools and prove that the word can rightly be considered the basic unit of language, and the peculiarities of lexical semantics require additional and detailed study. The research tasks were the analysis of scientific linguistic studies on the word, the consideration of all points of view on the problem of the place of a word in linguistics, and the characteristic of lexical semantics as a field of linguistic science as a whole. The material of the research was the scientific works of linguists, the analysis of which was conducted using a descriptive, structural and comparative method. As a result of the research it was proved that, despite the difference in views on the word among many scientists, the word can really be considered the basic unit of language, and lexical semantics is a full and significant branch of semantics as a science.