II. Form, meaning, function

This idea found its way into grammar through a famous Danish grammatitian Otto Jespreson. It is necessary to study the morphological characteristics of words as well as their syntactic position (abilities). He produced the third rank theory. It was based on mutual relations of words in sentences. When he illustrated his theory, he used the following patterns:

1) an extremely hot weather

2) a furiously barking dog

Describing relations between the words that:

“weather”, “dog” – should be called primary word

“hot”, ”barking” – secondary word

“extremely”, “furiously” – tertiary word.

He considered the morphological features of Eng words under the general title of syntax. But this theory was new at that time, and it was widely employed by the scholars of his school. This theory doesn’t cover the relations of all the main word classes. This theory left out the most important part of speech – the verb. His idea that words should be used in sentences was so popular, that some grammatitians tried to work out a p.of sp. classification based on syntactic criterion only – representatives of American school of describing linguists (Charles Freeze).

To classify words it is not enough to rely on the description of elements in the sintagmatic chain. Meaning is to be taken into consideration. But his understanding of meaning is not traditional.

Structural meaning

~The man gave the boy the money.

It conveys the following information: who preformed a certain action. How many men were involved in the action. The time of the action. See whether the situation is presented as a fact or as sth desirable. Sth state, required, desired. All this information (mostly grammatical) doesn’t coincide with the lexical information; it makes the structural meaning of the sentence.

He states that no sentence can be acceptable if it lacks either structural or lexical meaning. Then he claims that grammar is a system of devices that signals structural meanings. Formal devices – that can be given to different word-groups. His starting point is purely formal. He aims at analyzing formal exponent of grammar. He takes into account ordering of elements in syntagmatic chains. He declared that a part of speech is a functional pattern. To illustrate the patterns he introduced the minimal free utterance test frames.

a) the concert was good (always)

b) the clerk remembered the tax (suddenly)

c) the team went there.

Each word within the frames represents a particular slot (выемка, щель). All words that could fill the same slot as with no change of structural slot as with no change of structural meaning – class I words. In frames b) and c)

Class I words are identified by means of substitution. “Clerk” – names of presons. He also introduced a so-called adjective frame for the plural form of the noun.

~The concerts were good.

The idea of substantivation was further applied to the other word in the frames and thus he signaled out class II words (remembered).

Went + class III words – there

Good + class IV words – always.

He never provided any differences. He simply enumerated words belonging to this and that class. He never included other words in his frames. Instead of describing these words, he introduced the term “function words”, and grouped them into 15 groups, and ascribed the leters to them.

Group A (= marker of class I words) included determiners which can have the position of the definite article in frame a) (no, both, few, John’s, most, one). Viewed traditionally, determiners are represented by pronouns, adj, numerals, nouns in the possessive case.

Group B (= markers of class II words) is formed by the substitutes in the adjusted frame. ~The concert may be good. (must, should, come, got).

Group C (not)

Group D comprises words we can use instead of “very”.

~The concert was very good.

His grouping of functional words appeared as a result of using the semantic principle. Freeze claims that functional words must be learnt separately as peculiar signs that signal particular structure means. Among finctional words there are modal verbs, auxiliary words, modal verbs – are treated as separate words viewed apart from class words. He also grouped modal verbs and auxiliary verbs in groups. If it is so, we cannot divide verb forms into synthetic, analytical. Synthetic and analytical forms show different grammatical categiries (tense – synthetic; aspect - analytical).

Freeze’s classification is inconsistent. It is claimed to be fomal but in many cases he relies on meaning. His classification is based on 2 principles:

1) He analyses functioning of words of the 4 major classes. He studies their meaning including them into functional words.

2) His classification never explains the grammatical difference between classes of forms, functional groups, notional goups.

The grammatical school of Russian Soviet linguists has made a serious input in the problem of p.of sp. classification. All the known principles have been taken into consideration, and put in a reliable system. To divide words into p-s of sp., 3 ideas are to be applied to a word:

1) semantically, lexico-grammatical meaning of a word is to be considered.

Taking into accout that the lexico-grammatical meanings are different but are closely connected. Thus words known as nouns show signs of substantivity. Verbs denote actions and state which are different aspects of the process.

2) The morphological principle is described as the aspect of the formal view of grammatical phemonena. It has 2 sub-principles:

a) describing a word, we are to consider its morphological categories. Each p.of sp. possesses certain morphological categories which are not found in other p.pf sp. This principle is applied to words that have certain form-building means to signal the presence of categories (changeable words).

b) word-building affixes. There are affixes typical of this or that p.of sp.

Of the 2 sub-principles, the first is more important because most word-building affixes are ambiguous (двусмысленный). (friendly, homely, kindly, safely, possibly, merely)

3) Syntactic principle.

a) we rely on the syntactic role of a word in a sentence

b) we consider the syntactic description of words in phrases, sentences.

Semantic principle: each class (the N, V, Adj) has a unified abstr m-ng): N denote substances, V – process, act; Adv – properties of act; Adj – prop-s of substances, qualities.

Though POS posess Gr m-ng and material shape in language they form an independent system and may contact in speech. Many parts of speech have their own special sets of morphological categories and form-building morphemes that signal those categories (grammatical paradigme).