FEATURES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF LEXICAL UNITS IN THE GERMAN LANGUAGE

The proposed article is devoted to highlighting the peculiarities of the development of lexical units in the German language, spanning from antiquity to the present day. The aim of the study is to investigate the morphological variables of German lexemes and their impact on the development of lexical units as a whole. The morphological elements of German lexemes in the diachronic perspective of their formation and functioning have been chosen as the object of the research. The subject of the study is the linguistic features of the development of lexical units in the German language from ancient periods to the present time. Ancient and modern dictionaries of the German language by V. V. Levytskyi, R. Schützeichel, B. Hennig, M. Lexer, and G. Wahrig served as the research material. Descriptive and comparative-historical research methods were employed in this study. As a result of the conducted research, it was revealed that in Old German, there were contradictions between the grammatical form and its inflection. Furthermore, the difference between case endings depended not so much on the characteristic of the case itself, but rather on the stem-forming suffix, which determined the type of declension. The examined stem-forming elements can be considered formal-grammatical units that have lost their original meaning, although some entered the historical epoch as the most productive ones. A general reduction of stems and their merger with case inflection also occurred, resulting in an inseparable unity that in most cases cannot be subjected to elementary analysis, which provides opportunities for further research in this direction. The obtained data regarding the peculiarities of the development of lexical units in the German language hold certain significance for the study and teaching of the “Theory of the German Language”, “Lexicology of the German Language”, as well as the practical course of the German language.