- •The systemic nature of grammar. The two planes of language: the plane of content and the plane of expression. Two fundamental types of relations of lingual units. Their hierarchical relations.
- •The means employed for building-up member-forms of categorial oppositions. Synthetical and analytical types. The grammatical categories.
- •The category of case. Different approaches to the category of case in English nouns. The range of relational meanings of the English genitive.
- •The category of aspect. The opposition by which the aspective category of development is contrasted. The views on the essence of the perfect forms in modern English.
- •The category of mood. The opposition underlying the category. The problem of the imperative mood. The views on the classification of the subjunctive mood in English.
- •The category of voice, its difference from other verbal categories from the point of its referential qualities. The problem of the reflexive, reciprocal and middle voices.
- •The sentence as a unit of speech. The difference between the sentence and the word. Essential features of the sentence. The nominative function of the sentence.
- •The phrase. Two approaches to the definition of the phrase. Types of phrases. Means of expressing syntactical relations within a phrase.
- •Communicative types of sentences. Speech acts as realization of communicative intentions of the speaker. The three cardinal communicative sentences types. The problem of exclamatory sentences.
- •Actual division of the sentence, its purpose and main components. The formal means of expressing the distinction between the theme and the rheme.
The means employed for building-up member-forms of categorial oppositions. Synthetical and analytical types. The grammatical categories.
The means employed for building up member-forms of categorial oppositions are traditionally divided into synthetical and analytical; accordingly, the grammatical forms themselves are classed into synthetical and analytical, too.
Synthetical grammatical forms are realised by the inner morphemic composition of the word, while analytical grammatical forms are built up by a combination of at least two words, one of which is a grammatical auxiliary (word-morpheme), and the other, a word of "substantial" meaning.
Synthetical grammatical forms are based on inner inflexion, outer inflexion, and suppletivity; hence, the forms are referred to as inner-inflexional, outer-inflexional, and suppletive.
Inner inflexion, or phonemic (vowel) interchange, is used in English in irregular verbs for the formation of the past indefinite and past participle; besides, it is used in a few nouns for the formation of the plural (take — took — taken, drive — drove — driven; man — men, brother — brethren).
Suppletivity consists in the grammatical interchange of word roots. Suppletivity is used in the forms of the verbs be and go, in the irregular forms of the degrees of comparison, in some forms of personal pronouns (be — am — are — is — was — were; go — went; good — better; bad — worse; much — more; little — less; I — me; we — us; she — her).
Outer inflexion is a productive means of the English morphology, which amounts to grammatical suffixation.
The traditional view of the analytical morphological form recognises two lexemic parts in it, stating that it presents a combination of an auxiliary word with a basic word. However, there is a tendency with some linguists to recognise as analytical not all such grammatically significant combinations, but only those of them that are "grammatically idiomatic", i.e. whose relevant grammatical meaning is not immediately dependent on the meanings of their component elements taken apart.
Considered in this light, the form of the verbal perfect where the auxiliary "have" has utterly lost its original meaning of possession, is interpreted as the most standard and indisputable analytical form in English morphology. Its opposite is seen in the analytical degrees of comparison which, according to the cited interpretation, come very near to free combinations of words by their lack of "idiomatism" in the above sense.
Sometimes the synthetical forms of words are used instead of analytical forms for stylistic purposes: He knocked and knocked and knocked without reply.
The grammatical meaning is the most general meaning thanks to which this or that word belongs to the whole class of similar words. The grammatical meaning usually has a number of grammatical forms. Together with abstract grammatical meaning and grammatical forms the grammatical category appears. Grammatical meanings are very abstract, very general. Therefore the grammatical form is not confined to an individual word, but unites a whole class of words, so that each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its individual, concrete semantics.
The most general notions reflecting the most general properties of phenomena are referred to in logic as "categorial notions", or "categories". The most general meanings rendered by language and expressed by systemic correlations of word-forms are interpreted in linguistics as categorial grammatical meanings. The forms themselves are identified within definite paradigmatic series.
As for the grammatical category itself, it presents a unity of form and meaning and constitutes a certain signemic system. More specifically, the grammatical category is a system of expressing a generalised grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms. The ordered set of grammatical forms expressing a categorial function constitutes a paradigm. The paradigmatic correlations of grammatical forms in a category are exposed by the so-called "grammatical oppositions".
The grammatical categories can either be innate for a given class of words, or only be expressed on the surface of it, serving as a sign of correlation with some other class.
For instance, the category of number is organically connected with the functional nature of the noun; it directly exposes the number of the referent substance, e.g. one ship — several ships. The category of number in the verb, however, by no means gives a natural meaningful characteristic to the denoted process: the process is devoid of numerical features such as are expressed by the grammatical number. Indeed, what is rendered by the verbal number is not a quantitative characterisation of the process, but a numerical featuring of the subject-referent. Cf.: The girl is smiling. — The girls are smiling. The ship is in the harbour. — The ships are in the harbour.
Thus, from the point of view of referent relation, grammatical categories should be divided into "immanent" categories, i.e. categories innate for a given lexemic class, and "reflective" categories, i.e. categories of a secondary, derivative semantic value. The verbal person and number are reflective, while categorial forms of the substantive-pronominal person and number are immanent. Immanent are also such categories and their forms as are closed within a word-class, i.e. do not transgress its borders; to these belong the tense of the verb, the comparison of the adjective and adverb, etc.
The feature of the referent expressed by the category can be either constant (the category of gender divides nouns into non-human names, human male names, human female names, and human common gender names) or variable (number: singular — plural; the degrees of comparison: positive — comparative — superlative).
Grammatical change has been interpreted in traditional terms of declension and conjugation. By declension the nominal change is implied (first of all, the case system), while by conjugation the verbal change is implied (the verbal forms of person, number, tense, etc.). Since the immanent feature is expressed by essentially independent grammatical forms, and the reflective feature, correspondingly, by essentially dependent grammatical forms, all the forms of the first order (immanent) should be classed as "declensional", while all the forms of the second order (reflective) should be classed as "conjugational".
Lexico-grammatical classes of words (parts of speech).The criteria applied in discriminating parts of speech. Possible ways of classifying parts of speech. The problem of notional and formal parts of speech. The syntactico-distributional classification of words.
Modern English has a vocabulary of more than 400 000 words. This number makes it clear that in order to study the forms of words it is necessary to divide words into certain separate classes. That is why the first problem in the study of morphology is the problem of grammatical classification of words. The words of language are divided into classes. These classes are called “parts of speech”. Prof. Smernitsky uses the term “lexico-grammatical categories”. The term POS is purely traditional and conventional.
In modern linguistics POS are discriminated on the basis of the 3 criteria:
semantic (meaning)
formal (form)
functional (function)
The semantic characteristic of a POS is its lexical meaning. It is always more general, more abstract that the meanings of separate words.
The formal or morphological characteristic of a POS is the system of forms this or that POS has (the morphological categories).
The functional or syntactical characteristic of a POS includes not only its function in a sentence, but also its connections with words of other classes.
The main principles of POS classification were elaborated by Prof. Sherba and Academician Vinogradov.
All these 3 points are to be taken into consideration both in English and in Russian. The difference lies in the fact which of the principles is the main one. That depends on the structure of the language. The Russian language is synthetical, it has a developed morphology, so the main principle is morphological (form). The English language is analytical, so the main principle here is functional (syntactical).
Taking into consideration these principles, linguists distinguish in the English language the following notional POS:
Nouns, Adjectives, Pronouns, Numerals, Verbs, Adverbs, Statives.
At the same time some formal POS are distinguished. Words which connect or modify notional words are called formal. They are:
Articles, Particles, Postpositions, Conjunctions, Prepositions.
Modal verbs, interjections and words of affirmation and negation are distinguished as separate classes.
The most exhausted classification of POS in our linguistics is given by Prof. Smirnitsky. He distinguishes the following classes of words:
notional words (nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, statives and numerals);
modal words;
functional or form words;
determinative (articles, particles, postpositions)
connective (conjunctions and prepositions)
the class of interjections;
the class of words of affirmation and negation.
Foreign linguists based their classification on the morphological principle. Practically, they distinguish 7 or 8 POS. They forget that modern English is already analytical, but not synthetical.
Prof. Sweet distinguishes declinable POS (nouns, adjectives, verbs) and indeclinable POS (particles, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections).
There are some linguists in foreign linguistics who take into consideration only one principle – synthetic. To such linguists Prof. Fries refers. His viewpoint is shared by Prof. Bloomfield and Prof. Harris. Synthetical distributional classification of words of Ch. Fries is based on the study of words combinability by means of substitution testing. Fries distinguished 4 classes of words:
Class 1 – nouns
Class2 – verbs
Class3 – adjectives
Class4 – adverbs
Prof. Fries also distinguishes 15 frames of function words.
The drawback of this classification is that he doesn’t give the exhausted classification of POS, many words are outside this classification and it is not convenient for practical language teaching.
While speaking about POS classification, we should mention the theory of field structure. It was elaborated by Prof. Shendels, Prof. Bondarko, Prof. Plotkin, etc. In every POS there are units which constitute its nucleus and possess all the characteristics peculiar of this POS. At the same time there are secondary units which do not possess all the characteristics of this or that POS, although they do belong to this POS. So, the field includes main and secondary units, and the task of a linguist is to define the constituents of the field, its main and secondary elements.