- •Grammar as a part of language. Padadigmatic and syntagmatic units
- •2) Grammar as a linguistic discipline. Variants of grammar. Types of Grammatical analysis.
- •3) Division of Grammar. Morphology and syntax
- •4) Grammatical meaning, Grammatical form
- •5) Grammatical category. The notion of opposition as the basis of gram.Categories.
- •6) The word as the smallest naming unit and the main unit of morphology
- •7) Parts of speech. Different approaches to the classification of parts of speech.
- •8) Criteria for establishing parts of speech:semantic,formal.Notinal and functional p. Of s.
- •9) General characteristics of the noun. Morphological, semantic and syntactic properties of the noun. Gramatically relevant classes of nouns
- •10. Morphological categories of Noun (number, case)
- •11. Article in English. Number and meaning of articles. The problem
- •12. Adjective. Classes. Statives
- •13. The adverb. Classes. Degrees of comparison
- •§ 3. In accord with their word-building structure adverbs may be simple and derived.
- •§ 4. Adverbs are commonly divided into qualitative, quantitative and circumstantial.
- •14. Verb. Classification
- •15. The Category of Tense. Problem of future. Future in the past
- •16. The place of continuous forms in the system of the English verb. The category of aspect
- •17. The place of perfect forms in the system of the English verb. The category of order (phase, correlation)
- •18)The category of voice in English. General ch-tics. The problem of the number of voices.
- •19. The category of mood in English. General characteristics. The problems of Subjunctive.
- •20) Finite and non-finite forms of the verb. Category of representation
- •21) General ch-ics of syntax as a part of grammar
- •22)The problem of the definition of the phrase. Phrases and forms of word connection
- •23) General characteristics of the sentence. Predicativity. Predication.
- •24) Classification of sentences. Structural and communicative types of sentence.
- •25)The formal structure of sentences. The model of parts of the sentence
- •26)The Problems of the Object, the Attribute, the adverbial modifier
- •27) The distributional model of the sentence. The model of immediate constituents
- •28). The transformational model of the sentence
- •29. Functional sentence perspective. The theme and rheme
- •30. The Semantic structure of the sentence. General Overview of Semantic Syntax
- •Valency theory
- •Deep case theory
- •33. Compositional Syntax
- •34. Pragmatic approach to the study of language units. Basic notions of pragmatic linguistics.
- •35) The grammatical features of dialogues and communicative parts.
- •37.Utterances and Texts. Speech Act theory
- •38. Text linguistics. Grammatical aspects of the Text.
- •39. General characteristics of the composite sentence. The compound sentence
- •40. The Comlex Sentence. Principles of classification
11. Article in English. Number and meaning of articles. The problem
The article is a function word, which means it has no lexical meaning and is devoid of denotative function. Semantically the article can be a significator,a linguistic unit representing some conceptual content without naming it. If analyzed in its relation to the conceptual reality, the article proves to be an operator,a marker of some cognitive operation, like identification and classification. there are two articles in English: the definite article “the” and the indefinite one “a”. It has become a tradition to also single out the so-called “zero” article, which is found in the contexts where neither the definite nor the indefinite article is used.
FUNCTIONS OF THE ZERO ARTICLE In most cases the zero article performs the same functions as the indefinite one. The difference is that the combinability of the latter is restricted to the group of countable nouns used in the singular form, whereas the zero article combines with uncountable nouns and countable nouns in the plural.e.g. It was a large room with many windows Still there are situations where the zero article is used in its specific functions which are different from those of the indefinite article. When used with the zero article, the noun loses its general grammatical meaning of thingness to a certain degree and acquires the meaning of qualitativeness. For example, the nouns “day” and “night” used with the zero article stand for “light” and “darkness” rather than time units.
ARTICLE DETERMINATION
Many scholars recognize the category of definiteness/indefiniteness (article determination). Though the article is used as the morphological marker of the noun, it can hardly be treated as a word-morpheme. The position of the article may be occupied by other words (demonstrative and possessive pronouns, etc ) Words, which have a distribution including the article position, are called determiners. The role of determiners is to specify the range of reference of the noun by making it definite or indefinite.
Meaningful absence of the article, or zero article, presupposes generalization.
In discussing the use of the articles it is essential to distinguish between specific, or particular reference, and generic reference:
The telephone is broken. (Specific reference)
The telephone к useful. (Generic reference)
The distinctions, which are important for countable nouns with specific reference, disappear with generic reference:
A telephone is useful.
The telephone is useful
Telephones are. useful.
The article plays an important role in structuring information. It is one of the means of distinguishing between facts already known (the theme) and new information (the rheme). The definite article is the marker of the theme, the indefinite article is the maker of the rheme.
Certain determiners (articles, demonstrative pronouns) can be used to show that a noun phrase is referentially equivalent to a previous noun phrase: Students are free to select optional courses. The options are popular. In such cases the article expresses no-reference, which is one of the means of sentence- connection.