Teaching the lexical aspect of speech in light of a renewed perspective on the meaning of a lexical unit

the purpose of this article is to examine contemporary approaches to defining what it means to “know a word”, with an emphasis on the multi-aspectual nature of lexical meanings. This includes such aspects as formal-semantic relationships, conceptual significance, associative links, collocations, stylistic and genre-related restrictions, ethical and contextual constraints, register features, and others. The article argues that a multi-layered approach to word knowledge must be integrated into the process of teaching vocabulary in order to achieve deeper and more adequate lexical competence. An expanded perspective on mastery of a lexical unit provides access not only to its meaning, but also to the sociolinguistic, socio-cultural, and linguacultural specificities of the target language and culture. The article presents a generalized concept of a “lexical unit”, including individual words, multi-word expressions, fixed collocations, set phrases, frames, and core sentence elements.

vocabulary, lexis, multi-aspectual nature, lexical unit, lexical meaning, word knowledge, lexical aspect of foreign language speech, module, strategy, tactics