5. Relations on different language levels.

Language signs:

• Segmental;

• Suprasegmental.

Segmental units consist of phonemes, they form phonemic strings of various status (syllables, words).

Suprasegmental units do not exist by themselves, but are realized together with segm. units & expres different modificational meanings (functions). These are intonation, accents, pauses, patterns of word-order.

Language levels:

1^st level – phonemic. It’s formed by phonemes as material elements of the higher levels.

The phoneme has no meaning (so it’s not a sign), its function is to differentiate morphemes and words as material bodies.

• Phonemes are combined into syllable

• A syllable is not a sign either.

Types of oppositions of phonemes:

• Privative, gradual, equipollent

• Binary (two members)

• More that binary.

The binary privative opposition is formed by a contrastive pair of members in which one member is characterized by the presence of a certain feature, while the other is char. by the absence of it. [b, d, g – p, t, k] - the feature is voice.

The gradual opposition - … by degree of the feature. [i: - I – e] – the degree of their openness.

The equipollent opposition - the members are distinguished by different positive features. [m] & [b], both bilabial consonants, form and equipollent opposition. [m] being sonorous nasalized, [b] being plosive.

Units of all higher levels of language are meaningful.

2^nd level – morphemic. The morpheme I the elementary meaningful part of the word. It is build up by phonemes.it express abstract meaning.

Morphemes: root morphemes; affixes.

The root expresses the concrete material part of the word. Affix – the specificational part of the meaning of the word.

The same opposition as previous.

The binary privative opposition [cat – cats] singular – plural.

The equipollent opposition constitutes a minor type.

The gradual opposition is not generally recognized.

3^rd level – lexemic. The word (lexeme) is a directly nominative unit of language. It names things and their relations. Word is built up by morphemes, the shortest word consists of 1 explicit morpheme only.

There are:

• Notional & functional words;

• Abstract & concrete words;

• Synonyms;

• Antonyms;

• Hyponyms.

These groups reflect paradigmatic structure of the vocabulary.

4^th level – proposemic level (the level of sentences). It includes phrases & sentences.

Notional phrases may be of a stable type & of a free type.

• The stable type phrases form the phraseological part of the lexicon.

• The free type – build up in the process of speech on the existing productive models.

The larger unit – sentences.

The particular function of the s. is to name a certain situation (real/unreal).

The supraproposemic level includes groups of sentences, which are united by one micro-topic.

In the printed text these sentence groups very often coincide with a peregreph.

6. Development of valency theory.

The French linguists Tesnierre was the first who use the term valency in linguistics.

According to his theory the verb/predicate performs a unique role in a sentence. Tesnierre insisted on the syntactical character of valency. Syntactic valency was seen as the ability of lexemes to bind a number of other elements in a grammatical construction.

The first edition in 1968 Helbig & Shenkel pioneered a new approach to valency theory. It proposed different levels of valency: logical, semantic, and syntactic.

Logical refers to logical predicates, that formalize a verb’s semantic content.

Semantic restricts predicate arguments to elements with certain semantic properties.

Syntactic defines requirements for the morpho-syntactic realization of arguments. Verbs with equal local and semantic arguments may require different cases.