Grammatical Form. Categorial Grammatical Meaning.

The word combines in its semantic structure two meanings – lexical and grammatical. Lexical meaning is the individual meaning of the word (e.g. table). Grammatical meaning is the meaning of the whole class or a subclass.

Grammatical meanings are very abstract, very general. Therefore the grammatical form unites a whole class of words, so that each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its individual, concrete semantics.

Examples:

1) The meaning of the plural of nouns is rendered by the regular plural suffix –(e)s, (in some cases by other means, such as phonemic interchange). Different groups of nouns ‘take’ this form with strictly defined variations (phonological or etymological conditioning): faces, books, dogs, oxen, sheep, men, formulae, radii, crises, phenomena.

2) tables

morphological form: it is a word consisting of two morphemes the root and the inflection.

grammatical form: the plural from of the noun denoting ‘more than one’.

The grammatical form presents a division of the word on the principle of expressing a certain grammatical meaning.

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. Any verb combines its individual lexical meaning with the grammatical meaning of verbiality – the ability to denote actions or states. An adjective combines its individual lexical meaning with the grammatical meaning of the whole class of adjectives – qualitativeness – the ability to denote qualities. Adverbs possess the grammatical meaning of adverbiality – the ability to denote quality of qualities.

There are some classes of words that are devoid of any lexical meaning and possess the grammatical meaning only (function words belong to this group – articles, particles, prepositions, etc).