MODERN INTERPRETATIONS OF THE CONCEPT OF INVARIANT IN LINGUISTICS

Abstract

The concepts of invariant and variant, characteristic of any essential characteristic of objects, phenomena, events of reality and their specific implementation in one terminology or another, are present in many sciences about the world. In one way or another, the concept of an invariant reflects the general properties of the classes of objects under study. Invariants are actually considered a metalinguistic designation of the content of a categorical seme. In the “Linguistic Encyclopedic Dictionary”, an invariant is characterized by V. M. Solntsev as “an abstract designation of the same entity (for example, the same unit) in abstraction from its specific modifications - variants” . With such an interpretation, in our opinion, an invariant appears to be an abstraction that is not directly related to the specific implementation of a particular linguistic unit. It seems that such a sharp opposition between language and speech and the concepts of an invariant and variants related to these two planes is unjustified.