The Theoretical Grammar.

1.Language and Speech. Language as a system. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations.

2.language levels and language units.

Q1.

Language – a system of signs connected by links or ties of different type.

Speech – manifestation of the language system in the process of communication.

First scientists to distinguish between language and speech – Ferdinant de Saussure, I.A. Beaudoin de Courtenay.

Sometimes linguists trying to underline the scientific terms speak about language proper and speech proper.

Smirnitsky – language and speech have units of their own; language = words, speech = utterance (or a sentence).

Sentences can also be regarded as part of language system.

Language is a macro-system which consists of a great number of subsystems – Phonological (- Vowels, consonants); Vocabulary (- Groups, synonyms); Grammar (- morphology).

Theoretical grammar aims at analyzing the inner structure of the English Language and revealing the mechanism of its functioning.

Relations between elements in language and speech.

Elements in any language are connected by paradigmatic relations:

Paradigm is an opposition of elements which have sth in common; many consist of two or more signs.

# [b, p]

Syntagmatic relations – relations b/w words in an utterance; opposed to paradigmatic; immediate linear relations b/w elements in a unit of speech (= syntagma). Can be: predicative; objective; attributive; adverbial.

Q2.

Language – levels which have their own units.

Language levels and units form the hierarchy.

The Lowest level – Phonological; unit – phoneme - no meaning; used to form units of higher level; differential function.

1. Morphemic level – morpheme – smallest meaningful unit; consist of phonemes; used to form words.

* Meaning is of a special kind, more abstract, is called significance.

2. Lexemic level – words: in grammar – smallest indivisible language units possessing positional independence in a sentence; - elements of grammatical class of parts of speech.

3. Phrasemic – phrase: word groups consisting of two or more words/ elements; used to name different phenomena but these phenomena are usually more complicated – polynomination; free or stable.

4. Denotemic – denoteme: notional parts of the sentence expressed by words or word groups and possessing a denotative function; they not only name different things but also indicate or denote objects, phenomena etc involved into a situation expressed by a sentence. # I like to walk with my dog.

5. Proposemic – sentences: used to name situations; predication; build up according to paradigms # interrogative sentences. Not so long ago this was the highest language unit in the hierarchy.

6. Supersentential constructions (sentences are combined together to form topical groupings) – supraproposemic level. Linguistic study is focused on syntactic process by which sentences are connected into unities.

7. Level of Texts. It’s not a well-developed sphere of linguistics.

Word in Morphology.

Q-s:

1. The morphemic structure of the word.

2. Grammatical classes of words.

Q1.

Morphology studies words, their structure and grammatical classes of words. Syntax studies relations between words in a sentence.

The word is a continuing string of morphemes but in English some words consist of two parts.

The 2^nd part may be divided from the 1^st one. That’s why we have different characteristics of a word: 1) word consists of morphemes; 2) words are minimal free linguistic units; 3) words are elementary sentence components.

Words consist of morphemes. Allomorphs are variants of morphemes.

It’s manifested in speech in the form of allomorphs. They have certain similarity and common meaning. They may coincide but as a rule they differ in form.

Morphemes are of different types. There exist different classifications of morphemes based on different principles:

1. Morphemes are differentiated into roots and affixes basing on positional, semantic and functional criteria.

Root morphemes express the meaning which is common to different words belonging to different parts of speech.

Affixes are divided: - a) based on position – prefixes, suffixes, infixes, postfixes.

b) word-building and form-building.

Word-building are used to form new words, they attach a new meaning to a word.

Form-building are used to build new forms of one and the same word. All the prefixes are word-building.

2. Another division of morphemes is based on the degree of self-dependence.

   1. bound – can’t build words by themselves.

   2. Free – can build word by themselves.

3. Morphemes are divided basing on segmental relations: - a) segmental – have material representation; b) supersegmental can’t exist by themselves. Here belong: intonation, stress, pause.

4. Basing on the principle of grammatical alternation.

   1. additive morphemes – added to the word (outer grammatical suffixes - worked)

   2. replacive – here belong root vowel alternation in forms of words (# man – men; write – wrote - written).

5. Basing on their linear characteristics: - a) continuous; b) discontinuous – a two-element grammatical unit (often – in analytical forms of verbs).

6. Basing on their formal presentation: a) overt; b) covert – sth that doesn’t have material representation.

The covert morpheme is a contrastive absence expressing a certain function. Zero morpheme – zero exponent.

Q2.

Traditional classification: words are divided into parts of speech based on three criteria – semantic, formal, and functional.

The main drawback of this classification is that sometimes it’s difficult to decide whether the word belongs to this or that group because some words are heterogeneous (glass – a glass, beauty – a beauty).

Charles Fries suggests another classification based on a functional criterion. He used the method of substitution.

According to him, there exist only four main positions of notional words in the English language: noun, verb, adjective, adverb.

He introduced a word of frames containing these positions.

Examples of frames:

1. The concert was good.

2. The clerk remembered the tax.

3. The team went there.

All the words which can take the position of ‘concert’, ‘clerk’, ‘tax’, and ‘team’ belong to the class of nouns.

The verb class consists of words which can take the position of the words ‘was’, ‘remembered’, ‘went’:

Adj class – ‘good’; adv class – ‘there’.

This classification is based on the syntactic criterion, and is rather interesting as it shows syntactical distribution of different parts of speech.

Parts of Speech.

The Noun.

Q-s:

1. General characteristics

2. The category of number.

3. The category of case.

4. The category of gender.

5. Article determination.

Q1.

Noun belongs to notional parts of speech. Noun possesses the meaning of thingness (grammatical meaning causing similar functional properties of words denoting objects and words denoting non-objects.)

Abstract ideas, qualities etc are presented as non-objects.

Nouns denoting objects and nouns denoting non-objects have differences:

• Nouns (non-objects) don’t usually possess the whole number of characteristics (# gender, case, number).

• Nouns (non-objects) are practically always derivatives (# happiness)

Noun possesses such morphological characteristics as number and case.

Two syntactical functions: object, subject.

Groups: a) proper and common; basing on the type of nomination; common – objects belonging to some type; proper – proper objects; don’t denote all the other things.

b) form of existence – animate and inanimate.

c) relation to number – countable; uncountable.

d) lexical meaning – class nouns, material, collective, etc.

Q2.

Grammatical category is an opposition of grammatical meanings and means of expressing them.

Two meanings: - singularity (zero exponent – way of expressing)

- plurality (suffix -s)

Several suffixes have the meaning of plurality: -en; -root vowel alternation; - suffixes of Latin origin

Functional synonyms – used to express one and the same grammatical meaning.

Three houses – three different objects; three hours – a period of time.

Waters/ snows – a great amount.

The difference between two numbers may increase to such a degree so the nouns develop a completely different lexical meaning.

# colours – flag.

Singular form doesn’t serve only to convey the meaning of oneness as some phenomena denoted by nouns don’t have quantitative purposes.

# glass/ water

Singular form – to denote a group of people or objects.

# family/ team

- to denote an object as the representative of a whole class.

# the tiger is in danger of extinction.

Most nouns have to correlating forms: singular and plural but there’re some which don’t.

This division is reflected in grammatical division of nouns into countable and uncountable.

Countables denote objects. Uncountables are heterogeneous – abstract notions; phenomena.

Uncountables – singular and plural.

Uncountable nouns are divided into two subclasses: singularia tantum, pluralia tantum.

Singularia Tantum – nouns are referred to as ‘absolute singular’ (excludes the use of numerals, indefinite article): - abstract notions # freedom; - material #sand; -names of sciences # chemistry; - collective nouns denoting a group of inanimate objects # furniture.

Pluralia tantum – nouns denoting material objects consisting of two halves # seasons; more or less indefinite plurality # outskirts.

Collective nouns – nouns denoting groups of objects as a single unit – heterogeneous; - some may be used in the plural form # families; - some don’t have a plural form # police; - can be used with the verb on both singular and plural which reflect the idea of how this group is understood.

Q3.

Several points of views: - traditional – two cases (common and possessive); - the number of cases (is more than two); - no case-forms.

Traditional point of view: - common – non-possession (zero exponent); - possessive – possession (-‘s suffix).

Any grammar of English states the fact that the category of case is restricted. Noun in the genitive case is used to express the meaning of possession: # school for girls – girl’s school.

Noun in the genitive case – function of an attribute; it can be substituted by a noun in the common case. # car roof – car’s roof.

Another peculiarity makes the existene of a form with –‘s rather doubtful.

# the Oxford professor of poetry’s lecture

Sometimes –‘s can be added to a phrase containing no noun at all. # smb else’s child.

As the suffix –‘s is added to a phrase. It stops being a morphological unit because any inflexion is an integral part of a word (it can’t belong to a phrase). It becomes a syntactical element, part of a phrase.

A form of genitive case is impossible to distinguish with a plural form if nouns in pronunciation. Semantic environment can help in such a situation.

All these limitations seem to prove that the form of the noun with –‘s can no longer be described as a case form, so this problem has been treated in different ways:

1. when –‘s is added to a noun it’s still the ending of an case inflexion.

2. When –‘s belongs to a phrase it tends to become a syntactical element. Since –‘s can be added to a phrase it can’t be treated as a case inflexion even when it’s added to a noun.

3. –‘s doesn’t express the grammatical meaning of possession; it’s means of expressing new grammatical category of possession.

Number of cases is more than 2.

There’re two theories the representatives of which claim this:

1. theory of positional cases

2. theory of prepositional cases

THEORY OF POSITIONAL CASES (Deutschbein, N. Field) – the unchangeable forms of nouns should be differentiated as different cases basing on functional positions nouns occupy in the sentence.

The noun in the nominative case functions as the subject of the sentence. The noun in the vocative case functions as direct address. The noun in the dative case – indirect object. The noun in the accusative case – direct object.

In order to confirm their theory they tried to compare the noun and the pronoun; they tried to combine the declension systems of noun and pronoun.

N he boy

O him boy

G his boy’s

This theory is usually criticized because it’s said to substitute the functional characteristics of the parts of the sentence for the morphological features.

THEORY OF PREPOSITIONAL CASES

Combinations of nouns and prepositions are understood as morphological case forms because they are used to convey the same grammatical meaning as inflectional case forms in other languages.

To + noun, for + noun – dative case

Of + noun – genitive case

This theory isn’t commonly applied as it fails to give an overwhelmingly logical explanation to the situation.

Mere semantical observation of the role of prepositions in the phrase shows that any preposition stands in the same grammatical relations to nouns - any combination consisting of a noun preceded by a preposition should be regarded as a case form.

Q4.

The category of gender can be purely grammatical or lexical-grammatical.

There are two points of view:

1. the category of gender exists as any noun can be substituted by a person pronoun (he, she, it). All inanimate nouns are substituted by ‘it’, so they are all of a neuter gender. Sometimes inanimate nouns can be substituted by he/she. Animals can be substituted by ‘it’.

There are special suffixes –ess. Pairs of nouns: man – woman, boy – girl, cow – ox.

2. The category of gender doesn’t exist as all these linguistic facts can’t be regarded as regular grammatical means to form a noun of an opposite gender.

So the gender only distinguishes biological sex with the help of lexical means. However, such linguists as Blokh, for example: state that the category of gender is expressed in English by obligatory correlation of nouns with personal pronouns or 3^rd person singular serving as gender classifiers of nouns.

So the category of gender is represented in English as a hierarchy of two oppositions. One upper opposition divides all the nouns into person (human) and non-person (non-human)- weak member of the opposition. Non-person nouns include both inanimate and animate nouns # tree, love, cat, bull, society, cow. All of them are substituted by ‘it’.

The other opposition divides person nouns into masculine and feminine. The feminine subclass being the strong member of the opposition.

There exist a number of person nouns which are capable of expressing both feminine and masculine person genders with the help of pronominal correlation.

# cousin doctor friend parent

Depending on the referent of the noun they can be substituted by he or she. These words are referred to as nouns of the common gender. But this isn’t a purely grammatical category as it looks the usual way of expressing.

Q5. Article determination.

Articles belong to the group of words which are called noun determiners. Here also belong possessive and demonstrative pronouns. They can’t be used together in the same phrase.

Questions: - how many articles are there in English?

- does the article belong to a part of speech?

Traditionally we say that English has two articles: definite and indefinite, and which are represented as material forms.

English nouns can be determined by both of them but English nouns can also be used without any article.

# Language is a means of communication. What do you know about the origins of man?

In these two sentences the nouns ‘language’ and ‘man’ have the meaning – language and man in general. Thus, in English we can find three forms of 1 noun: a (any) man, the man, man.

This opposition is treated in theoretical grammar, as an opposition of the indefinite article, the definite one and the zero article. So the number of articles increased to three. This idea is often criticized because when we say that there exists the zero article we mean it’s not a word.

This idea is connected with the status of the article. Sometimes the article is regarded as a form element, kind of morpheme is regarded as an analytical form. If the article is regarded as a word we can’t say zero article exists but we can speak about meaningful absence of an article.

Combination: article + noun – analytical form.

If it’s a phrase it should be free.

The combination article + noun is not an analytical form but a phrase of a special kind, something in between.

Meanings of articles.

Articles don’t possess lexical meaning but possess grammatical meaning. When combined with a noun it gives a shade of meaning to it. We usually define the meaning of the definite article as the meaning of individualization because it characterizes the object denoted by the noun as the definite one, singled out of similar objects belonging to the class.

The indefinite article characterizes the object denoted by the noun, it’s used with, as a representative of a class. It’s used to express the classifying mean.

Meaningful absence of the article is usually said to possess the meaning of absolute generalization or abstraction (# beauty).

Conclusion: the article is a word of a special character which serves to correlate a notion with the specific situation. There are two articles and meaningful absence which is used to convey individualization, the classifying mean and the generalization. Sometimes the article is believed to build the separate grammatical category which is called the meaning of definiteness.

Adjective

Questions:

1. General characteristics.

2. Grammatical category.

3. Substantivization of the adjective.

Q-n1. General characteristics.

Adjective – a part of speech denoting properties of an object.

Adjectives denote qualities seen as stable, not changing.

• Formal aspect.

Adjectives in modern English practically have no grammatical categories.

Two degrees of comparison are the only grammatical category of the adjective.

• Syntactical aspect

The functions of the adjective in the sentence: - attribute; predicative.

Groups (syntactic classification):

- both attributes and predicatives # hungry

- only attributes # utter

- only predicatives # afraid, reluctant, ill, alive

Adjectives restricted to attributive position don’t characterize the referent of the noun directly.

E.g. In the phrase “an old friend of mine” the use of the adjective “old” doesn’t necessarily imply that the person is old.

We can’t change the phrase into the construction “my friend is old”. The adjective characterizes not the person but the friendship.

E.g. “that old man”  the man is old b/c the adjective characterizes the man.

Adjectives characterizing the referent directly are called inherent.

Adjectives characterizing the referent indirectly are called non-inherent.

• Morphological structure.

Adjectives may be:

- simple

- derivative

- composite # 5-year-old

- compound

- Basing on their meaning:

a) relative – such properties of substances which are determined by its relation to some other substance; they are derivative (usually from nouns denoting materials); no degrees of comparison

# wood, historical, icy

b) qualitative various qualities of substances

c) intensifiers - # real hero; certain winner

d) limiter - # the only occasion; the main idea (particularize the referents of the noun)

e) stative realized in their functions, are used in syntactical constructions of different types

# tall (because it can’t be used in the phrase “to become tall”)

f) dynamic # careful (b/c it can be used “be careful”)

Groups of words difficult to classify:

• many, much, little, few, several – are often identified as adjectives because of their morphological characteristics and syntactical functioning,

• have degrees of comparison.

Some linguists claim them to be close to numerals or pronouns basing on their meanings.

Sometimes they are thought to belong to ‘quantifiers’.

• separate groups of words: words denoting state – (similar morphological structure – affix –a, used as predicatives only). Some linguists refer to them as statives.

Q-n2. Grammatical category of degrees of comparison.

Degrees of comparison – it serves to denote different intensity of quality.

Not all the adjectives possess it (e.g. relative), not all the qualitatives have it.

Qualitatives which are called ingradable ones. (absolute qualitatives). # blind, middle

Two degrees:

- comparative - superlative

Two ways of formation:

- synthetic - analytical