- •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 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 mood expresses the relation of the utterance to actual reality, presenting it as real, desirable, unreal, etc. The category of mood in the present English verb has given rise to many discussions. The only indisputable points in the sphere of mood seem to be these:
(a) there is a category of mood in Modern English,
(b) there are at least two moods in the modern English verb, one of which is the indicative. As to the number of the other moods and as to their meanings opinions today are far apart.
In traditional grammar 3 moods are distinguished: the indicative, the imperative, the subjunctive.
The use of the indicative mood shows that the speaker represents the action as real. This mood is universally recognized.
The imperative mood is used to express the modal meaning of urge. The imperative mood in English is represented by one form only, without any suffix or ending. It differs from all other moods in several important points. It has no person, number, tense or aspect distinctions and it is limited in its use to one type of sentence only, viz. Imperative sentences. Most usually a verb in the imperative has no pronoun acting as subject. However, the pronoun may be used in emotional speech, as in the following example: "You leave me alone!"
A serious difficulty connected with the imperative is the absence of any specific morphological characteristics: with all verbs, including the verb be, it coincides with the infinitive, and in all verbs, except be, it also coincides with the present indicative apart from the 3rd person singular. Even the absence of a subject pronoun you, which would be its syntactical characteristic, is not a reliable feature at all, as sentences like: You sit here! occur often enough. Meaning alone may not seem sufficient ground for establishing a grammatical category. Thus, no fully convincing solution of the problem has yet been found.
The Subjunctive Mood denotes actions that could have taken place in imaginary (unreal) situations. As to the Subjunctive Mood, the chief difficulty here is the absence of a straightforward mutual relation between meaning and form. Sometimes the same external series of signs will have two (or more) different meanings depending on factors lying outside the form itself, and outside the meaning of the verb; sometimes, again, the same modal meaning will be expressed by two different series of external signs (I think we should come here again to-morrow - How queer that we should come at the very moment when you were talking about us!; I suggest that he go - I suggest that he should go.
Prof. Barhudarov denies the existence of the subjunctive mood claiming that the forms should/would are not analytical, and such forms as If I knew/had known are to be considered as forms of the Past tense in a peculiar syntactical situation.