English Theoretical Grammar

The status of TG. Language is a means of forming and storing ideas as reflections of reality and exchanging them in the process of human intercourse. It’s social by nature and inseparably connected with people. It develops with the development of society. The language consists of 3 parts: the phonological system (i. e. sound system), the lexical system (set of naming means of language) and the grammatical system. The principles of systemic approach to language and its grammar were developed in the linguistics of the 20th century after the publication of the works by Beaudoin de Courtenay and Ferdinand de Saussure (they demonstrated the difference between lingual synchrony and diachrony). The 1st characteristic feature of Grammar is its abstract character (it abstracts itself from particular & concrete and builds its rules & laws, taking into consideration only common features of groups and words).

The 2nd characteristic feature of Grammar is stability (laws & categories of Grammar exist through ages without considerable changes). The main object of Grammar is the grammatical structure of language (i. e. the system of the laws of word changing & sentence building). There’re 2 types of Grammar: Normative and Theoretical. Normative Grammar is the collection of rules of the given language, manual of practical mastering the Grammar. It’s of a prescriptive character.

Theoretical Grammar is the branch of linguistics, which studies the forms of the words & their relations in sentences in more abstract way, giving the profound description of existing grammatical laws & tendencies; looks inside into the structure of parts of language & expose the mechanisms of their functioning, i. e. the mechanism of the formation of utterances out of words in the process of speaking. The aim of TG is to present a scientific description of a certain language. It’s of a descriptive character. “The aim of TG is to present a theoretical description of its grammatical system, i. . to analyze scientifically and to define its grammatical categories and study the mechanisms of grammatical formation of utterances out of words in the process of speech making. ” Essential notions of morphology: morph, allomorph, morpheme, word-form. Traditionally, the course of Grammar is divided into two parts: Morphology and Syntax. Syntax includes the sentence & the parts of the sentence; it makes the study of ways of connection words & word combinations in the sentences. Morphology deals with forms of words. It includes: parts of speech & their morphological categories.

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Morphological categories are represented in word forms. It studies the system of forms of word change. E. g. : the case & the number of the noun; person, number, mood of the verb etc. I. P. Ivanova says that the word is the basic unit of morphology. The word - is a nominative unit of language; it is formed by morphemes; it enters the lexicon of language as its elementary component (i. e. a component indivisible into smaller segments as regards its nominative function); together with other nominative units the word is used for the formation of the sentence - a unit of information in the communication process”. M. Y. Blokh). The morph is a minimal sequence of sounds, possessing certain meaning and regularly occurs in some environments. The morph is a minimal meaningful textual unit, the textual representative of a morpheme, i. e. a morph is a variety of a morpheme: e. g. the variant in- of the negative prefix un- is its morph. The morpheme is the elementary meaningful lingual unit built up from phonemes and used to make words. It has meaning, but its meaning is abstract, significative, not concrete, or nominative, as is that of the word. Morphemes constitute the words; they do not exist outside the words.

The morpheme is a group of one more morphs united by the same meaning and complementary distribution. Allomorphs are speech variants of morphemes (the plural morpheme -(e)s [s], [z], [iz]). Classes of morphemes:  Free (root) morphemes.  Bound (affixes) morphemes.  Word-morphemes (e. g. to give up): a) lexico-grammatical morphemes: He gave up the idea; b) grammatical morphemes: He has given me the book. Roots express the concrete, “material” part of the meaning of the word and constitute its central part. Affixes specify, or transform the meaning of the root. ay be of two kinds: of lexical or grammatical character. So, according to the semantic criterion affixes are further subdivided into lexical, or word-building (derivational) affixes, which together with the root constitute the stem of the word, and grammatical, or word-changing affixes (inflections), expressing different morphological categories, such as number, case, tense and others. With the help of lexical affixes new words are derived, or built; with the help of grammatical affixes the form of the word is changed. in-just-ice-s (prefix+ root+ suffix+ inflection)

Word-form is the unity of the stem and inflection: e. g. smiled = smile + ed. The other name for the word-form is lemma. We may play lemmas in the language: e. g. He went his came . Came is a word-form. Types of word-formation (derivation). Affixation: He rooms here. Sound alternation: foot-feet, speak-spoke. Suppletive formation: good-better-the best; go-went-gone. Analytical word-formation: I am coming; She is sleeping. Here the so-called problem of the analytical word-form arises. There are several approaches to the problem.

In order to solve this problem we should answer the question: How many auxiliaries are there in English?  The first approach (the traditional one) represents the principle of homonymy: should – modal: e. g. You should come to the classroom in time; should – Subj. : e. g. If I saw Helen tomorrow I should speak to her; should – Future-in-the-Past Tense: e. g. I told her mother that I should be happy to receive her here. The second approach is represented by R. Quirk. According to Quirk analytical word-forms are those which include only have, do, be, all the rest are modal verbs and phrases, which are polysemantic.

The third approach is usually connected with the name. He said: “We deal with the analytical word-form if we have auxiliary + the verb with inflection”: auxVing: am going; is working. A form-class is a set of word-forms which differ by the stems but have the same inflection. There are 8 form-classes in English:

1. Pl. noun – s;
2. Case noun – s;
3. Pres. Simple, person verb – s;
4. Degrees of comp. adv. , adj. – er, est;
5. Past simple verb – ed;
6. Past part. verb – ed;
7. Aspect verb – ing;
8. Present part. verb– ing.

Grammatical category is constituted by the opposition of at least two sets of form-classes contrasted to each other on the basis of some certain grammatical meaning: e. g. book – books (plurality), the category of number. The opposition within a category is necessary. The opposition is a generalized correlation of lingual forms by means of which a certain function is expressed. The correlated elements (members) of the opposition must possess two types of features: common features and differential features. There are 3 main qualitative types of oppositions:

• privative;
• gradual;
• equipollent.

By the number of members contrasted, oppositions may be binary (two members) and more than binary (ternary, quaternary, etc. ). The binary privative opposition is formed by a contrastive pair of members in which one member is characterized by the presence of a certain differential feature (“mark”), while the other member is characterized by the absence of this feature. In morphology the example is – the category of number: book – books. Here the differential feature of the opposition is “plurality”.

The gradual opposition is formed by a contrastive group of members which are distinguished not by the presence or absence of a feature but by the degree of it. In morphology the example is – the category of degrees of comparison of adjectives: clean – cleaner – the cleanest. The equipollent opposition is formed by a contrastive pair or group in which the members are distinguished by different positive features. The basis of morphological equipollent opposition is suppletivity, i. e. the expression of the grammatical meaning y means of different roots united in one and the same paradigm, e. g tense forms of the irregular verbs (go/went). Grammatical categories: N (number, case gender, V (the opposition of finite, non- finite forms; categories of person, number, tense, aspect, voice, mood), adj and adv. (degrees of comparison).  Classes of words: the criteria of classification. The words of language, depending on various formal and semantic features, are divided into grammatically relevant sets of classes. The traditional grammatical classes of words are called “parts of speech”.

In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated on the basis of the three criteria: semantic; formal; functional. The semantic criterion presupposes the evaluation of the generalized meaning, which is characteristic of all the subsets of words constituting a given part of speech. The meaning is understood as the “categorial meaning of the part of speech (of a class). The formal criterion provides for the exposition of the specific inflectional and derivational (word-building) features of all the lexemic subsets of a part of speech.

It deals with word-building affixation pattern and word-form affixation (grammatical paradigm). The functional criterion concerns the syntactic role (function) of words in the sentence typical of a part of speech and distribution (combinability). We can also speak about these categorial characterizations of words as meaning, form, function. 4. The field properties of word- classes. Field is a set of units which have a dominant integral feature which unites them and certain distinctive features allow a variation. A field approach helps to clarify many disputable points in the traditional classification of parts of speech.

The border lines between the classes of words are not rigid; instead of border lines there’s a continuum of numerous intermediary phenomena, combining the features of two or more major classes of words. Field theory states that in each class there’s a core, the bulk of its members that possess all the characteristic features of the class, and a periphery (marginal part), which includes the words of mixed character, intermediary between this class and other.

The three criteria of defining of defining grammatical classes of words in English may be placed in the following order: function, form meaning. Charles Frese divided all the words according to their functional syntactic features. He believed that all the words which can occupy the same position in the sentence must belong to the same class. He used the technique of substitution in the so called test-frames. He used 3 main test-frames. For his materials Charles Fries chose tape-recorded spontaneous telephone conversations comprising about 250,000 word entries (50 hours of talk).The concert was good. the structures meaning is thing and its quality at given time) The clerk remembered the tax. (actor, action & thing acted upon) . The team went there. (actor, action & direction of the action) Charles Fries used the technique of substitution: all the words that can substitute for the word ‘concert’ with no change of structural syntactic meaning would belong to one class. Using this technique Charles Frese pointed out 4 classes: noun, adjective, verb, adverb. As for the rest of the words, he distributed them into 15 functional groups by means of the same method in extended test-frames. The general characteristics of the noun. The Noun is considered to be the central nominal unit of language. The features of the noun are the following:

1. the categorial meaning of substance (“thingness”);
2. the changeable forms of number and case; the specific suffixal forms of derivation (prefixes in English do not discriminate parts of speech as such);
3. the substantive functions in the sentence (subject, object, substantival predicative); prepositional connections; modification by an adjective Nouns denote things and other entities presented as substances (beauty, progress).

The only category on nouns which is generally accepted is the category of number. Many scholars think that the notion of case applies to English pronouns, but not to nouns. Gender distinctions aren’t marked morphologically. The most characteristic function of a noun in the sentence is that of the subject. The function of object is also typical. Nouns are related by conversion with verbs (an eye – to eye) and with adjectives (native – a native) Nouns are characterized by some special types of combinabiliyty. Typical of noun is the prepositional combinability with another noun, a verb, an adj, an adv. an entrance to the house, to turn round the corner, red in face, far from its destination) Noun groups of the type N+N (stone wall, car roof), often called stone-wall constructions, take an intermediately position between nouns and noun phrases. Multicomponental structures are typical of newspaper and scientific style: ambulance staff pay dispute.

Noun subclasses Nouns fall into several subclasses which differ as to their semantic and grammatical properties: -common – proper (on the basis of type of nomination) -concrete- abstract countable – uncountable (on the basis of quantative structure) -animate – inanimate ( on the basis of for,, of existence) -personal –non personal (human – non-human) on the basis of personal quality Lexico-semantic variants of nouns may belong to different subclasses: paper – a paper. The class of nouns can be described as a lexico-grammatical field. Nouns denoting things constitute the centre, nucleus of the field. Nouns denoting processes, qualities, abstract notions are marginal peripheral elements of the field. The noun: the category of number. The category of number is expressed by the opposition of the plural form of the noun to the singular form of the noun. The strong member of this binary opposition is the plural. Its productive formal mark is the suffix (inflection) –(e)s [-z, -s, -iz] as presented in the forms dog-dogs, clock-clocks, box-boxes. The non-productive of expressing the number opposition are vowel interchange (man-men, tooth-teeth), the archaic suffix –(e)n (ox-oxen, child-children, brother-brethren), the correlation of individual singular and plural suffixes in a limited number of borrowed nouns (phenomenon-phenomena, criterion-criteria).

In traditional linguistics grammatical time is often represented as a three-form category consisting of the “liner” past, present,and future forms. The future -in –the- past does not find its place in the scheme based on the liner principle, this system is considered to be deficient, not covering all lingual data. Linguists build up a new system of tenses in order to find a suitable place in them for future -in –the- past. Some of them deny the independent status of future tenses while others exclude from the analysis future -in –the- past forms. In English there exist 2 tense categories.

The 1-st category- the category of primary time- expresses a direct retrospective evaluation of the time of the process denoted, due to which the process receives an absolutive time characteristic. This category is based upon the opposition of “the past tense” and “the present tense”, the past tense being its strong member. The 2-nd tense category is the category of “prospective” time, it is based upon the opposition of “ after-action” and “non- after-action”the marked member being the future tense. The category of prospect is relative by nature, it characterizes the action from the point of view of its correlation with some other action.

The verb acquires 2 different future forms: the future of the present and the future of the past. The future of the past is doubly strong expressing the strong member of the category of primary time and the category of prospect. 19 The verb: the category of aspect The category of aspect represented by 2 sets of forms in modern English: non-continuous (indefinite, simple), continuous (progressive). The categorical meaning of the continuous form is defined as the meaning of duration, while the indefinite form may be interpreted as having no spective meaning ( Ivanova), as a form having a vague content(Vorontsova), as a form stressing the fact the performance of action( Smirnitsky) Some linguist interpret the opposition of the perfect/ non-perfect forms as respective,others as opposition of tense forms( Sweet, Korsakov). Smirnitsky proved that perfect and non-perfect make up a category of time correlation. In eng. there exist 2 aspective categories: the category of development (based on the opposition of continuous and non- continuous forms)and the category of retrospective coordination( based on opposition of perfect and non- perfect forms)

The opposition of continuous and non- continuous forms can be neutralized and transponized . The opposition of perfect and non- perfect forms can undergo only the process of neutralization, transposition being alien to it. The grammatical category of time-correlation (of order, of phase) is represented by binary opposition, constituted by 2 form classes: perfect and non-perfect. The perfect is the marked member of the opposition both in form and in meaning. The non-perfect is a weak member of the opposition both in form and in meaning as a rule. -/++ Non-perfect. Perfect riteshas written wrotehad written will writewill have written This category shows whether the action is viewed as prior to other actions or irrespective of other actions. Linguists disagree as to the category of the perfect belongs. Some grammarians think that it forms part of the aspect system (the resultive aspect). Other linguists treat perfect as belonging to the tenses. Smirnitsky was the first to draw attention that the forms represent a grammatical category which is different from the category of tense, though it is closely connected with it. E. g. She has come. priority to the act of speech. She had come before he phoned over. – priority to the act of his phoning over. Thus the perfect forms express priority, whereas non-perfect lays the action unspecified. 20 The verb: the category of voice The grammatical category of voice is represented by a binary privative opposition constituted by 2 from classes, active & passive, in which passive voice is the marked member of the opposition both in form “to be +participle II” and in meaning. Active voice is a weak member both in form & meaning.

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