- •The scope of theoretical grammar
- •Theoretical grammar and its subject.
- •2. General principles of grammatical analysis.
- •3. General characteristics of language as a functional system.
- •4. Notions of ‘system’ and ‘structure’. General characteristics of the linguistic units.
- •The morphological level has two level units:
- •Basic linguistic notions
- •1. Language and speech.
- •3. General characteristics of the grammatical structure of language.
- •4. Morphology and syntax as two parts of linguistic description.
- •The noun
- •General characteristics.
- •2. The category of number.
- •3. The category of case.
- •4. The Problem of Gender in English.
- •Verb The general characteristics
- •Verb. The category of voice
- •Verb. The category of mood
- •Verb. The categories of tense, aspect and time correlation
- •Infinitive and Gerund
- •The Gerund
- •Participles
- •Pronouns
- •Numeral
- •Functional parts of speech. Preposition
- •Conjunctions
- •Particles
- •Interjection
- •Words, that don’t belong to any classification
Interjection
It is doubtful whether they are involuntary outcries, provoked by feelings of pain, joy, surprise, not restricted to any given language but common to all human beings as biological phenomena are.
But this only accounts for the etymology of interjections, which appeared from involuntary outcries, but now they belong to the word stock of the language as much as other types of words do. Interjections belonging to a certain language may contain sounds foreign to other languages. Thus, the English interjection alas contains the vowel phoneme [s], which is not found either in Russian or in German language; the Russian interjection ах contains the consonant phoneme [x], which is not found in English.
The interjections, as different from nouns, verbs, prepositions, are not names of anything, but expressions of emotions. Thus, the emotion expressed by the interjection alas may be named despair, but can’t be named alas.
Some of the interjections express quite definite meanings (alas can never express joy), others express feeling in general (oh – surprise, joy, disappointment, fear).
On the phrase level the problem is whether an interjection can be part of any phrase and what types of words can be connected with it. Usually interjections are syntactically isolated, but sometimes it can be connected with a group “preposition+noun”, naming the person or thing which causes the feeling expressed by the interjection: Alas for my friends!
The interjection oh can be followed by the adjective dear to form a phrase which itself is equivalent to an interjection: Oh dear! It can only be the first component of a phrase.
On the sentence level we have to consider interjections a part of the sentence, loosely connected with the rest of it, and approaching a parenthesis in its character. Oh, she used awful grammar, but she was trying so hard to be elegant. They can form a sentence by themselves: “Oh!” said Scarlet, her hopes dashed. Some phrases are equivalent to interjections: dear me! Goodness gracious!
Words, that don’t belong to any classification
The existence of such words is admitted by some linguists, Academician Scherba, for one.
The words “please, yes, no” can’t be described as adverbs either by meaning or by syntactical function.