Invention of arbitrary new items, borrowing new morphemes in these

categories.: “smurf,” “nuke,” “byte,” “grok.”

By contrast, prepositions (to, by), articles (the, a), pronouns (she, his), and

conjunctions are typically grammatical (function) morphemes, since they

either serve to tie elements together grammatically (“hit by a truck,” “Kim

and Leslie,” “Lee saw his dog”), or express obligatory (in a given language)

morphological features like definiteness (“she found a table” or “she found

the table” but not “*she found table”). Function (grammatical) morphemes

are also called “closed-class” morphemes, because they belong to categories

that are essentially closed to invention or borrowing - it is very difficult to add

a new preposition, article or pronoun. For years, some people have tried to

introduce non-gendered pronouns into English, for instance “sie” (meaning

either “he” or “she”, but not “it”). This is much harder to do than to get a new

noun or verb adopted.

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Lexico-grammatical free morphemes (modal verbs, link verbs)

preserve some lexical meaning while grammatical morphemes

(auxiliary verbs, articles) are deprived of any lexical meaning signaling

only grammatical meaning.

Bound morphemes, also called affixes, are either prefixes (attached

to the beginnings of words, e.g. re-build), or suffixes (attached to the

ends of words, e.g. look-ed). From the functional point of view affixes

are classified into derivational and inflectional. Derivational (lexical)

affixes make new words from old ones while inflectional (grammatical)

affixes build up new forms of the same word. Thus creation is formed

from create by adding a morpheme that makes nouns out of (some)

Verbs. And Boy and boys, for example, are two different forms of the

“same” word.

The morphological system of language reveals its properties through

the morphemic structure of words. Being a language of predominantly

synthetic structural type Ukrainian possesses a well developed system

of affixes (derivational and inflectional). Lexical affixes are used in

numerous derivational models and inflectional affixes are used as

primary means of indicating grammatical functions of words in the

sentence.

English as an analytic type of language, on the contrary, mostly

makes use of free morphemes (lexical, lexico-grammatical and

grammatical) having a poor system of affixes, in contrast to Old English

with its rather rich inflectional system. OE inflection has gradually

simplified in the course of time, reducing to about 14 native Anglo-

Saxon grammatical suffixes and a group of borrowed inflectional plural

morphemes found in Modern English (there are no grammatical prefixes

In English). So, the lack of grammatical affixes in English is

compensated by a considerably more extensive use of free morphemes

(lexical and grammatical). Free lexical morphemes are productive in

such word-building processes as conversion, compounding, postposition

formation, and phrasing. Free grammatical morphemes (form words) are

used to express grammatical meanings.

English derrivational affixes are more numerous, and among them

are international (those having common meaning and form in the two

languages, e.g., extra-, inter-, post-); semantically common (those

having the same meaning in English and Ukrainian, like agent suffixes

reader, читач; abstract noun suffixes, kindness, доброта) and

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specific national types ( mis-understand, щонайкращий). Affixation

(both derrivational and inflectional) is mostly of agglutinating nature in

English while Ukrainian has more affixes fused to the root. Another

allomorphism is that while in English suffixes can be either derivational

or inflectional (teacher, slowly vs. apples, kicked), prefixes are always

derivational (untie, recover, defrost).

Rather than add material, a grammatical morpheme can change some part

of the root, and this is called mutation (or sound alternation). Mutation as a

kind of morphological combination is typical of synthetic languages, thus it is

well presented in Ukrainian (несу – ніс, несу – носив, лугу - лузі). English

examples include past forms of some verbs (sing- sang,) comparative

adjectives (older-elder), plural nouns (foot-feet).

There are also suppletive forms (i.e. forms built of different roots)

in both languages though in English their number is rather scarce. The

examples are some irregular verbs, e.g. be – was, were; some

comparative adjectives, e.g. good – better - best), and some forms of

personal pronouns, e.g. I – me). In a broader morphological

interpretation suppletivity can be recognised also in such paradigmatic

correlations as: can – be able, must – have to, may – be allowed to, man

– people, news – items of news etc.

English affixes are mainly agglutinated to the root without causing

any changes of the latter (farm-er, dull-ness, taste-ful). Though there are

still cases of fusion - those are non-productive affixal models with root

inner changes: deep → depth, long → length, young → youth. In

Ukrainian the leading tendency is fusion: день – дня, бігу – біжить.

However some affixes (usually prefixes) may be agglutinted: казати с-

казати, під-казати, на-казати.

An important allomorphic feature is that in the English sentence

there are usually many words that coincide with root morphemes and it

concerns not only the unchangeable words but also notionals that have

grammatical forms. For example, in the following sentence functional

(unchangeble) words are in bold, and notional words that correspond in

form with their root are in italics: The sitting-room of our client opened

by a long, low window on to the old court of the college. The

corresponding Ukrainian sentence has only one unchangeble functional

word “на” (the notional word ”двір” is used in this sentence with a

zero morheme, i.e. grammatically meaningful absence of morpheme)) :

Гостинна кімната нашого клієнта відкривалася довгим, низьким

вікном, що виходило на старий двір колледжу. Ukrainian words are

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more distiguishable from root morphemes than English words, full

coincidence in form with root morphemes is typical in Ukrainian only of

functional words (prepositions, conjunctions, particles), and borrowed

words (жалюзі, ківі, суахілі, адажіо, кенгуру, інтерв’ю). Similarly,

words in Ukrainian differ markedly from word-phrases (пароплав),

while in English it is often a problem to discriminate between a

compound word and a phrase. Therefore English compound words are

sometimes differentiated from word phrases with the help of a word

stress (Cf.: ‘English teacher, a compound word with the stress on the

first element and יEnglish יteacher, a word phrase with the both

elements stressed). These allomorphic features are accounted for by

higher degree of synthesism of the Ukrainian language. They show

analytic character of the English language revealed in more independent

functioning of root morphemes in the sentence.

Both free and bound grammatical morphemes in English are

characterised by homonymy: e.g. the affix -er functions as a lexical and

a grammatical morheme; be I s used as a modal verb (free lexico-

grammatical morpheme) and as an auxiliary for Continuous and Passive

forms (free grammatical morpheme), which creates paradigmatic

ambiguity, a problem usually solved on a syntagmatic level.

2.2. Parts of speech

In every language, almost all of the lexical items fall naturally into a

small number of classes, and the words in each class behave

grammatically in much the same way. Linguists often call these word

classes or lexical categories, but the traditional term is parts of speech.

The ancient Greek grammarians recognized eight parts of speech for

their language. The Roman grammarians who followed them recognized

a slightly different list of eight classes for their own language, Latin.

Over the centuries, European grammarians proposed several different

lists for English and other languages. Different schools of grammar

present different classifications for the parts of speech (H.Sweet,

O.Jespersen, Ch.Fries, H.Glisson, L.Shcherba, I.Meshchaninov,

V.Vinogradov, V.Admony, E.Kubryakova), but none of them is

considered perfect.

The “traditional” classification of words is based on the three

criteria which have proved to be valuable in defining parts of speech:

semantic, formal and functional. The semantic criterion presupposes

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evaluation of the general implicit lexico-grammatical meaning,

characteristic of all the words constituting a given part of speech (e.g.

thingness - for nons, quality – for adjectives etc). The formal criterion

provides for the exposition of all formal features (specific derrivational

and inflectional) of all the lexemic subsets of of a particular part of

speech. The functional criterion concerns the typical syntactic functions

of a part of speech and its combinability.

According to their values, parts of speech are usually subdivided into

two classes: notional (open class) and functional (closed class).

Notionals are words that possess denotative ability, i. e. they have

nominative value (lexical meaning). Their nominative character enables

them to function as a separate part in the sentence. New notional words

are constantly added to lexical stocks of languages, old notional words

constantly leave a language as they become obsolete. Therefore notional

words are usually referred to as an “open” word class. Function words

(words like prepositions, conjunctions, determiners) have little meaning

on their own, but this meaning is different from that of notional words –

they do not name separate concepts. They only possess significative

value, i.e. they represent general conceptual notions (categories) not in

the way of nominating but by signifying or marking them. Thus,

function words are words that exist to explain or create grammatical or

structural relationships into which the notional words may fit. They are

much fewer in number and generally do not change as a language adds

and omits notional words. Therefore, function words are referred to as a

“closed” class.

In very heavily inflected languages with rich derivational

possibilities, such as Latin and Ukrainian, the form of the word is

usually a valuable criterion for distinguishing parts of speech. However,

in isolating languages with no inflection at all, such as Vietnamese and

classical Chinese, every single word is invariable in form, and inflection

is useless as a criterion for identifying word-classes. Even in the most

heavily inflected languages, however, it appears that there always exist a

few classes of grammatical words which exhibit no inflection at all.

English and Ukrainian, in accord with the traditional criteria of

meaning, form and function, have the parts of speech that almost

coinside. The languages have similar notionals (the noun, the adjective,

the numeral, the pronoun, the verb, the adverb, the stative) and similar

functional parts of speech with the exception of the article not found in

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Ukrainian (the preposition, the conjunction, the particle, the modal

word, the interjection). On the lines of the traditional classification the

English adjective, fo example, is described in the following way:

The adjective has:

(1) the categorial meaning of property;

(2) forms of degrees of comparison for qualitative adjectives;

specific derivative suffixes;

(3) syntactic functions of the atribute.

A major difficulty in English is that the same word can often belong

to different parts of spech (round N,V – round off the figures -,A, Prep –

come round the corner, Adv – come round with some fresh air. Some of

the forms are accounted by functional shift or conversion, but some of

them are homonyms. Recategorisation can occur within a class (from

one subcategory to another) or between classes. For example, the

subcategory of a noun can be shifted in the following ways: from

abstract to concrete (a youth meaning ‘a boy’), from uncountable to

countable (wines ), from proper to commomn (an Einstein meaning ‘a

genius’, a Benedict Arnold meaning ‘a traitor’).

Therefore the traditional criteria of meaning, form and function are

not equally important in the contrasted languages. In English, due to its

analytic nature and poor system of affixes, the part-of-speech

identification is mostly based not on formal characteristics (as in

Ukrainian, which is rich in synthetic forms) but rather on syntactic

properties of words. The different approaches to singling out parts of

speech in English and Ukrainian are accounted for by different

grammatical structures of the contrasted languages. The scarce number

of inflections in English resulted in the development of conversion

(shifting of words from one part of speech into another without change

in form). Due to conversion most English words display their lexico-

grammatical nature only on a syntagmatic level, i.e, in most cases it is

impossible to define what part of speech a word belongs to unless it is

used in a syntagmeme, i.e. a sentence or a phrase (Cf.: animals and

plats, plant trees, plant and animal life). The same is true for functional

parts of speech: the word before may function as preposition (before the

war) and conjunction (Before he came back…). Such polifunctional

nature of English words may cause what linguists call this structural

ambiguity. In a well-known sentence “Time flies like an arrow, fruit

flies like a banana” the ambiguity is caused by the fact that the words

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flies and like both have several meanings and can take on different roles.

In the first part of the sentence time flies like an arrow (meaning

minutes, hours and days go by as fast as an arrow can fly) whereas in

the second part fruit flies like bananas (little buzzing insects prefer to

snack on a yellow, curved fruit). The fact that the reader is likely to

misread the sentence at first and think the wrong parts belong together

makes it funny, because bananas flying in the same way that fruit does

is simply not plausible.

The ambiguity of form and meaning of many English words brought

some grammarians to a purely functional approach to the classification

of English words (based on syntactic featuring of words only). In

English the syntactico-distributional classification of words was worked

out by L.Bloomfield, Z.Harris, and Ch.Fries. The classification suggests

four classes (the term”parts of speech” being avoided) of notional words

according to the four main syntactic positions: those of the noun, verb,

adjective, and adverb. Pronouns are included into the corresponding

positional classes as their substitutes. Words incapable to occupy the

said main syntactic positions are treated as functional words. In

principle, the syntactic classification supplements the three-criterion

classification specifying the syntactic features of parts of speech.

The words assigned to a single part of speech are so assigned because

they have important grammatical properties in common. But it is practically

never the case that all the words in a given part of speech exhibit identical

properties inevery respect. Usually, the words in a given class show some

differences in their behaviour. It is therefore necessary to recognize some

subclasses, or subcategories, within each part of speech, and the existence

of such subclasses is called subcategorization. For example, among the

adjectives, some compare by inflection (small/smaller/smallest), some

compare with extra words (interesting/more interesting/most interesting),

and some don’t compare at all (first). The class of adjectives is therefore

subcategorized in this respect into gradable and non-gradable.In a word-class

with a large number of members, we often find that there exist very many

subcategories, and that these subcategories intersect and overlap

incomplicated ways. In English, the class of verbs is a good example of this.

Languages differ greatly in their parts of speech. In European

languages, the class of adjectives is open. In many other languages, it is

closed, and there exist only 6–12 adjectives. In still other languages,

there is no class of adjectives at all. In such languages, adjectival

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meanings are variously expressed by nouns or by verbs. So, instead of

an adjective big, a language may have a noun (with the meaning‘big-

thing’) or a verb(with the meaning ‘be big’). On the other hand, linguists

report that in Yidiny and in many other Australian languages the

functions of the English adverbs are divided among three parts of

speech: locational qualifiers, time qualifiers and true adverbs, all

distinguished by morphology and syntax.

In fact, the only parts of speech for which any linguists claim

universal status are nouns and verbs, since it is now clear that no

other parts of speech are universally present.

2.3. Grammatical categories

The grammatical category is a fundamental notion of theoretical

grammar. Such categories are usually a reflection of the objectively

existing things, their properties and interrelations. There is one

prerequisite for existence of a grammatical category in a certain

language: there should be an opposition of at least two word-forms in a

language expressing a certain grammatical meaning.

Grammatical category can be defined as an aggregate of grammatical

meanings opposed to each other and expressed by some formal criteria.

More specifically, the grammatical category is a system expressing a

generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation

of grammatical forms. Grammatical meanings are most general

meanings rendered by language. Therefore the grammatical form is not

confined to an individual word, but to a whole class of words, so that

each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical

meaning. For instance, the category of case in Modern English is based

on a two-member opposition of the Common case against the Genetive

case, the category of case in Ukrainian is based on the so called multiple

opposition (the seven-member opposition). The opposition may be

defined as a generalized correlation of two or more lingual forms by

means of which a certain grammatical meaning is expressed. The

member of the binary opposition that bears a certain differential feature

is called the “marked” member (or strong), the member in which the

feature is absent is called “unmarked” (or weak). The set of

grammatical forms in a category constitute the paradigm of the

category.

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Paradigms of notional words in English contain fewer flectional

forms than those in Ukrainian, e.g.: English nouns have 2 flectional

forms (cars, car’s), English verbs have 4 flectional forms (write –

wrote – written – writing). The paradigm of a notional word may also

have suppletive forms (the longest one is that of the verb be: am, is,

are, was, were, been, be, being). The morphological paradigm of the

word also includes analytical forms, and these make paradigms of

English words rather complicated. On the contrary, Ukrainian

paradigms of notinals have considerable number of flectional forms and

few analytical forms (e.g. analytical future form, comparative and

superlative degree forms).

Besides the above described explicit (formal) morphological categories

there are also so called implicit lexico-grammatical categories. Here belong

general implicit lexico-grammatical meanings of parts of speech (for

example, the meaning of “thingness” in nouns, the meaning of “property”

in adjectives etc.); here also belongs the implicit lexico-grammatical

meaning of transitivity/non-transitivity of verbs, etc. Implicit lexico-

grammatical categories have no formal expression but they influence (limit)

the realization of some explicit grammatical categories. For instance, the

implicit lexico-grammatical category of transitivity restricts the sphere of

application of the formal category of voice: intransitive verbs are

commonly not used in the passive.

Grammatical meanings have different morpho-syntactic implementations

in the languages of the world. One language has grammaticalised a

distinction that another language represents only optionally in the lexicon. A

concept can be expressed by a grammatical category in one language, but be

expressed only lexically in another. Crosslinguistic or comparative research

into the realization of semantic categories in related and non-related

languages is an interesting and expanding field of research. Research on

referential categories (definiteness, specificity, genericity) has shown that

such categories are differently encoded in particular languages, and that

although languages differ in grammatical structure they can nevertheless

express the same concepts.

All languages possess the same set of about 25 categories each of

which have several functions (roughly 100). Languages differ in how

they express these categories in speech: some use lexemes (Chinese,

Vietnamese), some use free-standing grammatical morphemes

(pronouns, prepositions, etc.), while others use affixes. When one begins

learning a new language, one does not have to learn a new set of

grammatical categories since all languages have the same categories;

30

one only has to learn how these categories are expressed in the new

language. According to a popular linguistic approach children learning

their first language have a similar advantage - they are born with these

categories built into their brains.

Thus languages differ quite strikingly in terms of which grammatical

categories are built into their morphology. Second, grammatical

categories are in a sense forced on the speakers of a language. In

English, we need the -s for pencils in the phrase three pencils; three

pencil is ungrammatical even though it is perfectly understandable. For

example, English nouns are inflected for number, and number inflection