COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS : GRAMMAR - SHORT NOTES
GRAMMAR is the body of rules describing the properties(свойства )of the language. A language is such that its elements must be combined according to certain patterns(модели).
Descriptive and prescriptive grammars.
Historical grammar
Comparative grammar
Terms : isomorphic and allomorphic(In English and Ukrainian there are isomorphic and allomorphic forms of the verbals. Isomorphic (common) are the infinitive and the two participles, and allomorphic are the gerund in English and the diyepryslivnyk in Ukrainian.
The English infinitive is always distinguished by its identifier «to» (to come, to be asked, to be doing), whereas the Ukrainian infinitive is characterized by the suffixes -ти, -ть, -тись, -тися.
The infinitive in Ukrainian has no perfect passive form, no continuous aspect form, no perfect active and perfect passive forms of the Participle that are pertained to the present-day English (to have slept, to be sleeping, to have been seen, having been asked/ having asked, etc.)
The gerund and the diyepryslivnyk present allomorphic verbals in English and Ukrainian respectively. As a result, they cant be contrasted in any way.)
The isomorphic features are due to the common origin of the compared languages (for English and Russian/Ukrainian – common Indo-European origin)
Allomorphic features are acquired during the process of the historical development and functioning as independent national languages.
TWO MAJOR PARTS OF GRAMMAR
The major parts of grammar are MORPHOLOGY and SYNTAX which deal respectively with vocabulary (WORDS) and how they are put together to form PHRASES, CLAUSES and SENTENCES.
TYPOLOGY OF THE MORPHOLOGICAL SYSTEMS OF ENGLISH AND UKRAINIAN (RUSSIAN)
The morphological systems of the English and Ukrainian languages are characterized by a considerable number of both isomorphic and allomorphic features. The isomorphic features are due to the common Indo-European origin of the two languages, while allomorphisms have been acquired by both languages in the course of their historical development as independent languages.
The main typological constants that lie at the basis of any linguistic contrasting at the morphological level are three, namely:
morpheme
the parts of speech
morphological categories
THE MORPHEME
The morpheme is a minimal meaningful unit
Simple VS compound morphemes
ENGLISH |
UKRAINIAN |
Sings alike |
Беру весна |
-ment, -hood |
Суспільство сільський |
2 FREE VS BOUND morphemes
Free or root morphemes are lexically and functionally not dependant on other morphemes. Bound morphemes, on the other hand, cannot function independently.
Day, he, four - ніч, день
Daily, fourteen - нічний, денний
In comparison with the Ukrainian, English has a much larger number of morphologically unmarked words, i.e. words consisting of root morphemes only. In the result, the number of inflections expressing various morphological categories is considerably fewer in English than in Ukrainian.
AFFIXAL MORPHEMES (SUFFIXES AND PREFIXES)
DERIVATIONAL VS INFLECTIONAL
DERIVATIONAL morphemes in both languages are mainly suffixes. In both languages the number of suffixes considerably exceeds the number of prefixes.
English suffixes : 60 noun forming , 26 adjective forming, , 5 verb forming, 3 adverb forming
Ukrainian word-forming suffixes are more numerous and more diverse in their nature, and this is partly due to the existence of the grammatical genders that need to have formal identification.
Suffixes of the feminine gender English VS Ukrainian /Russian
In addition there exist in Ukrainian /Russian large groups of evaluative – diminutive and augmentative noun suffixes (53 vs 16)
PARTS OF SPEECH
The terms “Parts of Speech” and “Word Classes”
The first to group words into classes was Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) Being a founder of logic, Aristotle equated the relations between ideas in human mind with relations between words in speech and established grammatical categories in terms of logic. It was Aristotle who introduced into Grammar such notions as “subject” and “predicate”. His criterion for discriminating between the parts of speech was the ability of words to express the parts of a logical proposition, i.e. the subject, the predicate and the copula. A proposition is a sentence expressing something true or false.
e.g. All men are mortal. Socrates is a man.
Aristotle established 3 parts of speech: the name, the verb and the conjunction. By the "name" he meant the word which can perform the function of the subject. The "verb" represented the predicate. All the functional words, such as prepositions, articles, conjunctions, particles were referred by him to conjunctions.
PARTS OF SPEECH IN ENGLISH (Traditional approach)
Traditional classification:
Nouns Verbs Adjectives Adverbs Pronouns Prepositions Conjunctions Interjections
In Russian and Ukrainian the formal morphological characteristics of words are always explicitly displayed already at the language level (as for example in dictionaries, or without any context).
The variability of some English words which can often shift from one part of speech to another without any morphological changes in their form is certainly the main typological (allomorphic) difference between English and Russian /Ukrainian.
CRITERIA FOR DISTINGUISHING THE PARTS OF SPEECH
In modern linguistics, the parts of speech are traditionally singled out on the basis of three principles which are meaning, form, and function.
The meaning of words belonging to the class of nouns. The abstract meaning is thingness (or substance ). The meaning of thingness applies to the meaning of the noun and constitutes the meaning of the noun as part of speech. Similarly, the meaning of the verb as a part of speech is action or process. These general meanings are neither lexical nor grammatical, but are connected with both and therefore are referred to as “lexico-grammatical”. In classical theory of the parts of speech the semantic feature was a leading criterion in attributing the word to a certain part of speech.
The second principle of delimiting parts of speech is form. Grammatical forms represent grammatical categories. Thus, the noun is characterized by the categories of number and case; the verb - by the categories of tense, mood, voice, aspect, person and number.
Syntactical properties of a certain class of words are displayed through the word’s position/role in the sentence and its ability to combine with other words (“combinability”). E.g. The noun is usually preceded by adjectives, prepositions, pronouns, articles and is followed by the verb.
Russian linguistic tradition: meaning, form and function. e.g. table – a noun because 1) it is the name of a thing (specific meaning), 2) it has forms of number and case and 3) it can function as a subject or an object in a sentence.
The number of parts of speech in the traditional grammars seems to be arbitrary. Why 8? (nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and interjections)
Prof. Ilyish – 12 (+ numerals, statives, modal words and particles), prof. Khaimovich and Rogovskaya – 14 (+ articles and response words).
Words of the category of state
B.A. Ilyish -
3 criteria: 1. meaning – passing state
2. Form – prefix – a- , no degrees of comparison
3. function of a predicative (He is afraid of difficulties)
Barkhudarov. Blokh disagree - degrees of comparison : The one more aware of the situation…
Function – attribute - man alive
ACCIDENCE (PARTS OF SPEECH)
Summary: according to their meaning, morphological characteristics and syntactic functions words fall under certain classes called parts of speech.
Notional // structural (functional) Open // closed
the noun
the adjective
the pronoun
the numeral
the verb
The adverb
The words of the category of state
The modal words
The interjection
The structural parts of speech either express relations between words and sentences or emphasize the meaning of words or sentences. They never perform any independent function in the sentence.
the preposition
the conjunction
the particle
the article
THE NOUN
Meaning – form –function
Morphological characteristics
simple (contain neither prefixes nor suffixes)
derivative (productive // non-productive suffixes;
compound (snowball, blackboard, etc…. disguised compounds)
Typologically isomorphic groups : common // proper nouns
Abstract // concrete
Mass nouns
Collective nouns
A collective noun is a noun that is singular in form but refers to a group of people or things.
Sometimes they refer to a group of specific things:-
Tables, chairs, cupboards etc. are grouped under the collective noun furniture. Plates, saucers, cups and bowls are grouped under the collective noun crockery.
These collective nouns are often uncountable.
Sometimes they are more general:-
Groups of people - army, audience, band, choir, class, committee, crew, family, gang, jury, orchestra, police, staff, team, trio
Groups of animals - colony, flock, herd, pack, pod, school, swarm
Groups of things - bunch, bundle, pair, set, stack
Grammatical categories of the noun:
category of number
category of gender
category of case
THE CATEGORY OF NUMBER
Like in Ukrainian, in English the category of number is mostly realized synthetically, i.e. through zero and marked inflexions respectively:
Child – children Ox – oxen
Day –days Watch – watches
Completely allomorphic is the formation of English plurals with the help of sound interchange:
Foot-feet; tooth – teeth; man – men
And zero marked plural : Singular= Plural : sheep, deer
The major allomorphic feature in the system of noun categories is the existence in Ukrainian (as in Russian, and Byelorussian) of dual number , which is often mixed with the plural.
The nouns express dual number only in connection with the numeral adjuncts TWO, THREE, FOUR: this number is mostly indicated by stress, which differs, as a rule, from stress of the plural form.
e.g. берег – берегИ – два(три. Чотире берЕги
дуб – дубИ – два(три, чотире) дУби
Typologically isomorphic is the existence in English and Ukrainian of the classes of singularia and pluralia tantum nouns.
Singularia tantum words:
parts of the world : the North, the South, the East, the West
names of materials: iron, copper, milk
abstract notions: news, information, weather
Pluiralia tantum words:
summation nouns : shorts, trousers, spectacles, glasses
names of games: cards, billiards, drafts
Pluralia tantum // singularia tantum
A plurale tantum (Latin for in the plural only; plural form: pluralia tantum) is a noun that appears only in the plural form and does not have a singular variant for referring to a single object. Many languages have pluralia tantum, such as the English words clothes, scissors, pants, and trousers, the Russian word "den'gi" [деньги] ("money").
The term for a noun which appears only in the singular form is singulare tantum (plural: singularia tantum), for example the English words "information", "dust" and "wealth". Singulare tantum is defined by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as: "Gram. A word having only a singular form; esp. a non-count noun.". In the English language, such words are almost always uncountable nouns. In some non-count words, the plural means "more than one sort of". Some words are nearly always in the singular because only one example exists of what the noun means.
Quantifying a plurale tantum noun requires a measure word, for example "one pair of scissors" instead of "one scissors".
In the case of Russian деньги, its singular деньга formerly existed and meant a small copper coin worth half a copeck; financial inflation sent the coin, and with it the word, into disuse.
Category of gender
The linguistic notion of grammatical gender is distinguished from the biological and social notion of natural gender.
Ukrainian: masculine, feminine, neuter
English is characterized by an absence of the morphological category of gender:
The great emperor lived long
The great actress lives long
The great idea lived long
All lifeless things in English are associated with the pronoun IT (the neuter gender)
When personified English lifeless nouns may be referred to different : Reed and Swallow in Happy Prince by Oscar Wild); death, war – “he” in English
Suffix –ess ( as in : actress, tigress, poetess, etc.) express sex, and not the morphological gender.
While grammatical gender was a fully productive inflectional category in Old English, Modern English has a much less pervasive gender system, primarily based on natural gender and therefore often expressed at the lexical level.
MASCULINE
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