Systemic organization of language.
1. Subject of theoretical grammar.
Grammar may be practical and theoretical. The aim of practical grammar is the description of grammar rules that are necessary to understand and formulate sentences. The aim of theoretical grammar is to offer explanation for these rules. Generally speaking, theoretical grammar deals with the language as a functional system.
2, 4 Grammatical stucture of the english language.
According to their grammatical structure languages can be synthetic (1 ) and analytical ( 2 ).
In 1 – the grammatical relations between words are expressed by means of the –i-, -n-, -f-, -t-.
In 2 - the grammatical relations between words are expressed by means of the form words and word order. 2 forms are mostly proper to verbs. Its form word has no lexical meaning and expresses different grammatical categories: mood, person, tense, voice, and a notional word ( infinitive or a participle). The 2 forms are:
tense and aspect of the verb forms ( continuous, perfect, all future forms ).
The passive voice.
Subjunctive mood.
However there are some synthetic features in English:
endings -s- in 3rd person sing. In the Present Simple.
endings –s in plural of nouns.
endings –‘s in genitive case.
endings – ed in the Past Simple.
Inner flexions – woman – women, man – men, speak – spoke.
The synthetic form of the subjunctive mood
3. Morphology and syntax as two main parts of grammar.
Syntax, originating from the Greek words συν (syn, meaning "co-" or "together") and τάξις (táxis, meaning "sequence, order, arrangement"), can in linguistics be described as the study of the rules, or "patterned relations" that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. Syntax attempts to systematize descriptive grammar, and is unconcerned with prescriptive grammar (see Prescription and description).
There exist innumerable theories of formal syntax — theories that have in time risen or fallen in influence. Most theories of syntax at least share two commonalities: First, they hierarchically group subunits into constituent units (phrases). Second, they provide some system of rules to explain patterns of acceptability/grammaticality and unacceptability/ungrammaticality. Most formal theories of syntax offer explanations of the systematic relationships between syntactic form and semantic meaning.Syntactic category: is either a phrasal category, such as noun phrase or verb phrase, which can be decomposed into smaller syntactic categories, or a lexical category, such as noun or verb, which cannot be further decomposed. In terms of phrase structure rules, phrasal categories can occur to the left side of the arrow while lexical categories cannot. The lexical categories are traditionally called the parts of speech. They include nouns, verbs, adjectives, and so on.Morphology is a sub discipline of linguistics that studies word structure. While words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. Morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies such rules across and within languages
5. Dichtonomy of language and speech
A dichotomy is any splitting of a whole into exactly two non-overlapping parts. In other words, it is a mutually exclusive bipartition of elements. i.e. nothing can belong simultaneously to both parts, and everything must belong to one part or the other. They are often contrasting and spoken of as "opposites." The term comes from dichotomos (divided): dich- ([in] two) temnein (to cut). The above applies directly when the term is used in mathematics, linguistics. For example, if there is a concept A, and it is split into parts B and not-B, then the parts form a dichotomy: they are mutually exclusive, since no part of B is contained in not-B and vice-versa, and they are jointly exhaustive, since they cover all of A, and together again give A.
6. Systemic relations in language. Syntagmatic relations.
A linguistic unit enters into syntagmatic relations with other units of the same level it occurs with. SR exist at every language level. They can be of three different types: coordinate, subordinate and predicative.
a)Coordinate SR exist between the homogeneous linguistic units that ax
that is, they are the relations of independence: you and me; They were tired but happy.
Suhordinated SR are the relations of dependence when one linguistic unit depends on the othex- teach + er - morphological level; a smart student - word-group level; predicative and subordinate clauses - sentence level.Predicative SR are the relations of interdependence: primary and secondary
7. Systemic relations in language. Paradigmatic relations
A linguistic unit can enter into relations of two different kinds. It enters into paradigmatic relations with all the units -that can also occur in the same environment. are relations based on the principles of similarity. They exist between the units that can substitute one another. According to different principles of similarity PR can be of three types: semantic, formal and functional.
Semantic PR are based on the similarity of meaning: a book to read = a book for reading.
Formal PR are based on the similarity of forms. Such relations exist between the
members of a paradigm: man - men; play - played'- will play ~ is playing.
Functional PR are based on the similarity of function. They are established between
the elements that can occur in the same position.
8. Linguistic units.
In fact, the word is considered to be the central (but not the only) linguistic unitof language' Linguistic units (or in other words - signs) can go into three types of relations:
a)The relation between a unit and an object in the world around us (objective reality). - refers to a definite piece of furniture. It may be not only anobject but a process, state, quality, etc. .
This type of meaning is called referential meaning of a unit. It is semantics that studies the referential meaning of units.b) The relation between a unit and other units (inner relations between units). No unitcan be used independently; it serves as an element in the system of other units. This kind of meaning is called syntactic. Formal relation of units to one another is studied by syntactics (or syntax).c) The relation between a unit and a person who uses it. As we know too well, when we are saying something, we usually have some purpose in mind. We use the language as an instrument for our purpose (e.g.). One and the same word or sentence may acquire different meanings in communication. This type of meaning is called pragmatic. The study of the relationship between linguistic units and the users of those units is done by pragmatics.
Morphology.
1, 2 The morpheme, classification of morphemes, types of morpheme.
Morpheme. is the smallest language unit that carries a semantic interpretation. Morphemes are, generally, a distinctive collocation of phonemes (as the free form pin or the bound form -s of pins) having no smaller meaningful members. Types of morphemes. Free morphemes like town, dog can appear with other lexemes (as in town hall or dog house) or they can stand alone, or "free". Allomorphs are variants of a morpheme, e.g. the plural marker in Bound morphemes like "un-" appear only together with other morphemes to form a lexeme. Bound morphemes in general tend to be prefixes and suffixes. Morphemes existing in only one bound form are known as "cranberry" morphemes, from the "cran" in that very word. Inflectional morphemes modify a word's tense, number, aspect, and so on. (as in the dog morpheme if written with the plural marker morpheme s becomes dogs). Derivational morphemes can be added to a word to create (derive) another word: the addition of "-ness" to "happy," for example, to give "happiness."
3. The word as the smallest naming unit.
A word is a unit of language that carries meaning and consists of one or more morphemes which are linked more or less tightly together. Typically a word will consist of a root or stem and zero or more affixes. Words can be combined to create phrases, clauses and sentences. A word consisting of two or more stems joined together is called a compound.As the word is the main unit of traditional grammatical theory, it serves the basis of the distinction which is frequently "drawn between morpfiology and syntax. Morphology deals with the internal structure of words, peculiarities of their grammatical categories and their semantics while traditional syntax deals with the rules governing combination of words in sentences (and texts in modern linguistics). We can therefore say that the word is the main unit of morphology.It is difficult to arrive at a one-sentence definition of such a complex linguistic unit as the word. It is also the basic nominative unit of language with the help of which the naming function of language is realized. One of the most characteristic features of the word is its indivisibility. As any other linguistic unit the word is a bilateral entity. It unites a conceptand a sound image and thus has two sides - the content and expression sides: concept and sound form.
8. Grammatical categories of communication.
Grammatical categories are made up by the unity of that have the meanings have the same form (e.g. singular::plural). Due to dialectal unity of language and thought, grammatical categories correlate, on the one hand, with the conceptual categories and, on the other hand, with the objective reality.It follows that we may define grammatical categories as references of the corresponding. obiective categories. For example, the objective category of time finds its representation in the grammatical category of tense, the objective category of quantity finds its representation in the grammatical category of number. Those grammatical categories that have references in the objective reality are called referential grammatical categories. They are called significational categories. To this type belong the categories of moodand degree. Speaking about the grammatical category of mood we can say that it has modality as its conceptual correlate. It can be explained by the fact that it does not refer to anything in the objective reality - it expresses the speaker's attitude to what he says.The relation between two grammatical forms differing in meaning and external signs is called opposition-book::books (unmarked member/marked member). All grammatical categories find their realization through oppositions, e.g. the grammatical category of number is realized through the opposition singular::plural.
9, 10. Parts of speech. Different approaches.
The parts of speech are classes of words, all' the members of these classes having certain characteristics in common which distinguish them from the members of other problem of word classification into parts of speech still remains one of themost controversial problems in modern linguistics. The artitude of grammarians with regard to parts of speech and the basis of their classification varied a good deal at different times. Only in English grammarians have been vacillating between 3 and. 13 parts of speech. There are four approaches to the problem:
Classical (logical-inflectional)
Functional
Distributional
Complex,
The classical of speech theory is.based on Latin grammar. According, to the Latin classification of the parts of speech all words were divided dichotomically into declinable and indeclinable parts of speech. declinable words, included nouns, pronouns, verbs and participles, indeclinable words - adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. Based on the the principle of declinability/indeclmability is not relevant for analytical languages.Functional - To/nominative parts of speech belonged noun-words (noun, noun-pronoun, noun-numeral, infinitive, gerund), adjective-words (adjective, adjective-pronoun, adjective-numeral, participles), verb (finite verb, verbals - gerund, infinitive, participles), while adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection belonged to the group of articles.A Distributional approach to the parts to the parts of speech classification can be illustrated bythe classification introduced by Charles Fries. He wanted to avoid the traditional terminology and establish a classification of words based on the ability of words to combine with other words of different types. At the same time, the lexical meaning of words was not taken into account.In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated according to three, criteria: semantic, formal and functional. This approach may be defined as complex. The semantic criterion presupposes the grammatical meaning of the whole class of words (general grammatical meaning). The formal criterion reveals paradigmatic properties: relevant grammatical categories, the form of the words, their specific inflectional and derivational features. Thus, when characterizing any part of speech we
are to describe: a) its semantics; b) its morphological features; c) its syntactic peculiarities.The linguistic evidence drawn from our grammatical study makes it possible to divide all the words of the language into:those denoting things, objects, notiona, qualities, etc. - words with the corresponding references the objective reality. – notional wordsthose having no references of their own in the objective reality; most of them are used only as grammatical means to form up and frame utterances - function
11. Noun as a part of speech
A noun, or noun substantive, is a part of speech (a word or phrase) which can co-occur with (in) definite articles and attributive adjectives, and function as the head of a noun phrase.
The word "noun" derives from the Latin nomen meaning "name", and a traditional definition of nouns is that they are all and only those expressions that refer to a person, place, thing, event, substance, quality or idea. They serve as the subject or object of a verb, and the object of a preposition. That definition has been criticized by contemporary linguists as being quite uninformative. For example, it appears that verbs like kill or die refer to events, and so they fall under the definition. Similarly, adjectives like yellow or difficult might be thought to refer to qualities, and adverbs like outside or upstairs seem to refer to places. But verbs, adjectives and adverbs are not nouns, so the definition is not particularly helpful in distinguishing nouns from other parts of speech.
Case, number, and gender
In sentences, noun phrases may function in a variety of different ways, the most obvious being as subjects or objects. For example, in the sentence "John wrote me a letter", "John" is the subject, and "me" and "letter" are objects (of which "letter" is a noun and "me" a pronoun). These different roles are known as noun cases. Variant forms of the same noun—such as "he" (subject) and "him" (object)—are called declensions.
The number of a noun indicates how many objects the noun refers to. In the simplest case, number distinguishes between singular ("man") and plural ("men"). Some languages, like Arabic (and also Saami and Aleut ) also distinguish dual from plural.
Many languages (though not English) have a concept of noun gender, also known as noun class, whereby every noun is designated as, for example, masculine or feminine.
12. Category of number.
English countable nouns have 2 categories of number:
singular
plural
І.The plural form is formed be adding the ending-s, -es, pronounced as /z/, /s/, /iz/.
2. if the noun ends in –y presided by a consonant. –y is changed into –i + -es-
13. Category of case.
Case indicates the relations of the noun ( or pronoun ) to the other words in the sentence. Nouns denoting living beings and some nouns denoting lifeless things have two cases:
the common case.
the genitive case.
The genitive case is formed by:
‘s – is used with the singular and plural nouns not ending in –s:
a man’s job, men’s job, a child’s voice, a children’s voice.
b) a simple apostrophe (‘)is used with plural nouns ending in –s:
the students’ hostel, the Smiths’ car.
other names ending I –s can take “ ’s ” or the “ ’ ” alone:
14. The problem of gender.
In linguistics, the term gender refers to various forms of expressing biological or sociological gender by inflecting words. For example, in the words actor and actress the suffix -or denotes "male person" (masculine), and the suffix -ress denotes "female person" (feminine). This type of inflection, called lexical gender, is very rare in English, but quite common in other languages, including most languages in the Indo-European family. Normally, Modern English does not mark nouns for gender, but it expresses gender in the third person singular personal pronouns he (male person), she (female person), and it (object, abstraction, or animal), and their other inflected forms.When gender is expressed on other parts of speech, besides nouns and pronouns, the language is said to have grammatical gender. Grammatical gender may be partly assigned by convention, so it doesn't always coincide with natural gender. Furthermore, the gender assigned to animals, inanimate objects and abstractions is often arbitrary. Gender can refer to the (biological) condition of being male or female, or less commonly hermaphrodite or neuter, as applied to humans, animals, and plants. In this sense, the term is a synonym for sex, a word that has undergone a usage shift itself, having become a synonym for sexual intercourse.
15. Noun determiners. The article.
An article is a word that is put next to a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles can have various functions:
a definite article (English the) is used before singular and plural nouns that refer to a particular member of a group. (The cat on the mat is black.)
an indefinite article (English a, an) is used before singular nouns that refer to any member of a group. (A cat is a mammal).
a partitive article indicates an indefinite quantity of a mass noun; there is no partitive article in English, though the words some or any often have that function.
a zero article is the absence of an article (e.g. English indefinite plural), used in some languages in contrast with the presence of one. Linguists hypothesize the absence as a zero article based on the X-bar theory.
16, 17, 18, 19. General characteristics of a verb.
Verb is a part of speech that denotes an action,
It has the following grammatical categories:
- person- aspect
- number- voice
- tense- mood
These categories may be expressed by means of affixes, innaflexions (change of the route vowel) and by form words.
According to the functional verbs perform in the sentence; they canform finite(особові) and non-finite forms.