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vocabulary and the specific laws and regulations that govern its
development. The source and growth of the vocabulary, the
changes it has undergone in its history are also dwelt upon, as the
diachronic approach revealing the vocabulary in the making
cannot but contribute to the understanding of its workings at the
present time.

2. A word as a fundamental unit of a language
The real nature of a word and the term itself has always been
one of the most ambiguous issues in almost every branch of
linguistics. To use it as a term in the description of language, we
must be sure what we mean by it. To illustrate the point here, let us
count the words in the following sentence:
You can’t tie a bow with the rope in the bow of a boat.
Probably the most straightforward answer to this is to say
that there are 14. However, the orthographic perspective taken by
itself, of course, ignores the meaning of the words, and as soon as
we invoke meanings we at least are talking about different words
bow, to start with.
Being a central element of any language system, the word is
a focus for the problems of phonology, lexicology, syntax,
morphology, stylistics and also for a number of other language and
speech sciences. Within the framework of linguistics the word has
acquired definitions from the syntactic, semantic, phonological
points of view as well as a definition combining various
approaches. Thus, it has been syntactically defined as “the
minimum sentence” by H.Sweet and much later as “the minimum
independent unit of utterance” by L.Bloomfield. E. Sapir
concentrates on the syntactic and semantic aspects calling the word
“one of the smallest completely satisfying bits of isolated meaning,
into which the sentence resolves itself”. A purely semantic
treatment is observed in S. Ullmann’s explanation of words as
meaningful segments that are ultimately composed of meaningful
units. The prominent French linguist A. Meillet combines the

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