ON THE LINGUISTIC DESCRIPTION OF THE WORD AND THE LEVEL OF THE WORD

Аннотация

The basic unit of language is the word. Because the functioning of any language as a means of communication in society is primarily related to the word. Therefore, F. de Saussure said: “The word, regardless of all the difficulties associated with its description, occupies a central place in the mechanism of language.” The article discusses how to characterizea word in a language system, what are the specific features of a word and a lexeme, the description of a word in paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations, the role of words and lexemes in studying the internal structure of the language and related laws, the definition of a word and the level based on it within language units, the description of a word as a unit and a sign, how to understand the properties of aphoneme, morpheme and aword as alanguage unit. Keywords:Paradigmatic relationship, syntagmatic relationship, language structure, language sign, language unit, morph, morpheme, concept of level, justification of levels, word, word form, types ofmorpheme, root, suffix, lexeme. When F. de Saussure, discussing the word, singles out the difficulties associated with its description and reminds us that they create various obstacles to understanding the word as a concrete unit of language. For example, some words are extremely complex in nature, and they cause various confusions and difficulties by combining elements of a lower level than the word, while some words come from a higher level (compound words) and deviate from their own pattern, while others require the form of a morpheme. Based on this, F. de Saussure also noted that it is difficult to characterizea concrete unit oflanguage through a word. Perhaps, this is why Saussure's student Sh. Balli emphasized the need to use the term semantics instead of the term word and said that it is necessary to abandon the concept of a word. I.F. Vardul also emphasizes that the concept of a word is ultimately vague, abstract, and that explanatory issues related to it are often observed, especially in the framework of lexicological and morphological studies. E.M. Lazutkina emphasizes the opinion of the famous linguist A.V. Dobiash that "Words are fragments of thewhole(осколкицелого)". Of course, such ideas are scientific hypotheses, which are necessary for the development of ourscience. In thehistory oflinguistics, more than three hundred definitions of aword have been given, and in them the word as a linguistic unit has been assessed both positively and negatively. However, it is difficult to get rid of the concept of a word. However, it is true that the concept of a word is an extremely problematic phenomenon for our linguists. In the words of A.M. Peshkovsky, a word is an unsolved riddle for our linguists. This can be observed in all issues related to the sound composition of a word, its morpheme shell, grammatical form, lexical meaning, etc. Because the fact that a single phoneme can also be used as a word, the fact that a root morpheme can express a lexical meaning and function as a word, the fact that several words can express a single lexical meaning, the fact that phraseological units can be equated with the page321 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ISSN:2692-5206,ImpactFactor:12,23 AmericanAcademicpublishers,volume05,issue07,2025 Journal: https://www.academicpublishers.org/journals/index.php/ijai meaning of a word, the fact that vocatives can be used as sentences, the fact that a single word can express the meaning of the text, etc., show that this language unit is extremely complex. The famous French linguist (comparative scientist) A. Mayet, taking into account such “puzzles”, said:“Theword, itslinguistic nature, cannot bedetermined.” Representatives of American descriptivism (in particular, L. Bloomfield, G. Gleason) almost do not use the concept of a word in the process of studying linguistic material. For example, we see that G. Gleason did not devote even a small section of his 24-chapter and 485- page work “Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics” to the issue of word description. The author mainly used the concept of a morpheme. However, no matter how difficult and complex its description is, it is undeniable that the word occupies a central place in the language system. Because we perceive language primarily not through forms or sounds, but through words. Words also form thevocabulary of alanguage. It should also be noted that in some studies, it is emphasized that using the concept of lexeme instead of the concept of word is appropriate. This can be observed in the textbook “Modern Literary UzbekLanguage”bySh. Rahmatullayev. Indeed, a lexeme is considered a lexical unit, and from this point of view, words in the dictionary of the language can be called by this name. However, the concept of a word seems to beofgreat importance in describing thegrammatical form ofaword. In our opinion, firstly, the term lexeme can only replace a word as a structural element of the language. Secondly,