Theoretical grammar

Надежда Николаевна Кузьмина (теоретические основы)

Иванова, теор. Грамматика современного

Каушанская Грамматика Английского языка

Plan:

1. The subject matter of grammar

2. Paradigm and syntagma

3. Parts of speech. Classification of parts of speech

4. Notionals and functional

Grammar – is the study of the structure of human language. This term is also applied to books that set out rules governing languages use.

Grammar includes such subtopics as: morphology (principles of word formation, how words formed and structured) and syntax (principles of sentence structure, how they combined into larger structures).

Grammar studies the formal properties of words and sentences.

The domain of morphology is the paradigmatics of a word. Morphology studies the forms of words and their paradigms.

Paradigm – a set of the grammatical forms of a word (boy-boys-boy’s-boys’)

Paradigm on the lextical level - is a set of primary and secondary nominations with lexical meaning.

On the lever of word building is a set of derivatives (производные) (structure, restructure, comfortable uncomfortable);

On the syntactic level is a set of transformations of kernel (суть, ядро, зерно) sentences. (all possible transformations with sentence, like changing tenses)

The domain of syntax is the syntagmatics of a word. Syntagma – a linear (линейная, парадигма вертикальная)) sequence of elements (he’s a fine boy)

In a paradigm words are in paradigmatic relations, they have paradigmatic meaning. These meanings are constant in variable subject to no change. In a syntagma – paradigmatic meanings are complicated by syntagmatic meanings, which are variable subject to contextual change. Skies – ‘s’ the meaning of plurality (paradigm meaning), but also with it moprpheme acquires contextual (syntagmatic) meaning of emotiveness, expressiveness.

Parts of speech:

1. traditional

2. functional (Prague linguistic school)

3. descriptive or structural (American descriptive linguistics)

4. onomaseological approach (theory of nomination)

Through history it was considered that the best way to describe the language is to describe its words classes. For centuries the writers of grammars included 8 classes of words which they refered to as parts of speech. Modern grammars support these ideas. As language is a structure words are to be structurally organized.

Traditionalists rely upon meaning. As the essential criterion, but the meaning is very subjective, it can’t be absolutely relied upon, it’s subjective. In some grammars adjective is described as analysis attribute of substance (аналитическое определение вещества) – criterian of meaning, The then director (adverb). She’s not a woman to drop (infinitive). When such a definition isn’t reliable, traditionalists refer to form or function.

Words were divided dichotomically (that means consequent division of one whole part into two): declinables (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and indeclinables (adverbs, particles, prepositions, conjunctions). This is a formal criterion. E.g. adverb Is a word that modifies (определяет) a verb/adjective/another adverb. Noun is a word which forms the plural by adding ‘s’ or its equivalents (formal approach).

Prague linguistic school called parts of speech as bundles (набор) of morphologically relevant features and described words in terms of their paradigms (set of all possible forms of a word). Verb has the largest paradigm. The compromising solutions was offered by Sweet and Jespersen. The offered a synthetic approach, combining meaning form and function. E.g., a words is described as belonging to these or that class on the basis of its semantic meaning (a table names a thing). It has some morphological form (e.g., plural - tables) and it has syntactical properties (the words table occurs in typically noun position)

Structuralits or descriptivists rejected the traditional approach. They preferred to rely only upon positional arrangement of words and there structural characteristics types of inflections and derivational suffixes. Charles Fries operated with an artificial structre: Woggles ugged diggles (woggles – a noun, ugged – verb, diggles – noun). He relies up on the use of languages intuition. He stands for disregarding of the lexical meaning but for the function of a word in a sentence. Function is the main notion!

Both traditionalist and descriptivists divide parts of speech into:

1. Notional (самостоятельные, знаменательные) (major, variables, semantically full words). These are open classes. E.g., I’m wifed, aunted and cousined (nouns are verbalized). Nouns can be verbalized and all words classes can be nominalised. E.g., his life was all blacks and whites. Lexically full words have a paradigm. They are communicatively important, serve as members os sentence.

2. Functional or functional groups of words (invariables, semantically empty words).

These are closed classes because we cannot invent new prepositions and conjunctions, but

New functional: conjunctions like from analysis adjective like ‘Never do like he has done’

Intensifiers: Why bloody not?

Pronoun that can be used as analysis adverb of degree: It actually was that good.