The word is the main, central, key unit of the language. A person named any actions and states, determined all the qualities and signs. He expressed all knowledge about the world, its phenomena and properties in a word.
What is a word and what is not? Do individual sounds count as words? What are the criteria for defining a word? Linguists answer these questions differently. The characterization of the word and its definition today is one of the most controversial issues in the science of language.
The complexity of the problem is determined by the difficult nature of the word, the difficulty in distinguishing it from both the morpheme and the phrase. The solution of this issue is complicated by the phenomena of polysemy, homonymy, etc. Since at all levels of the language - phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactic - the word is the unit, it is difficult to give a single definition that can satisfy the tasks of all levels.
The word is infinitely diverse in its meanings, structure, grammatical features. The role of words in the language is different: these are the names of objects and phenomena, the transfer of relations between words, the expression of feelings and human emotions. Words are pronounced differently, some have stress, others lose it in speech. They can lose, change and develop their inherent lexical meaning of the word, expanding or narrowing its boundaries over time.
The question of what a word is, is forced to deal not only with linguists, but also with each of us. And first-graders who are just starting to comprehend the basics of grammar, and graduates who have managed to accumulate enough experience not to be afraid of an exam in literature, and every adult who knows the grammar of his native language well and has vast practical experience in writing.
Without defining the signs of a word, we cannot say what it is. Its most important features are the lexical meaning of the word (the ability to name objects, signs, actions, numbers), as well as grammatical meaning (morphological features, material for building phrases and sentences). In addition, the word also has formal features: reproducibility, stability, isolation and single-stress.
The lexical meaning of a word is considered to be its most important feature. This is what distinguishes the word from phonemes - smaller lexical units. As regards the nature of meaning, the word is primarily opposed to the sentence. The main difference is that in speech a sentence is used ready-made, as an utterance, while a word can express a concept. In some statements, one word can correlate with a whole episode of extralinguistic reality.
It often happens that the lexical meaning of a word is wider than one concept. It may include evaluative and expressive components, but this does not apply to all words. For example, proper names do not correspond to concepts. They name only a particular object, which does not apply to the whole class of similar objects. If any of the proper names begins to designate a number of objects with similar characteristics, it loses its exclusivity and goes into the rank of common nouns.
Concepts are also not expressed by words that only point to an object - such as pronouns. Suppose a personal pronoun refers to someone who is speaking, but does not refer to all speakers. A pronoun without an extralinguistic pointing gesture or a reference in the text to a previous mention of a given subject will not be able to clearly tell which subject it is.
Interjections are directly related to emotions and also do not name concepts. The conclusion suggests itself that the lexical meaning of words is not inherent in all of them. Although, of course, sometimes the interjection acts as another part of speech. Then it turns into a full-fledged word and its lexical meaning passes to it. In this situation, the interjection even becomes a member of the sentence. For example: “Hey guys!”. "Oh yes" in this sentence plays the role of a definition.
