Chapter 2. Categorial structure of the word.

There are 3 fundamental notions: grammatical form, grammatical meaning, and grammatical category. Notional words possess some morphemic features expressing grammatical meanings. They determine the grammatical form of the word.

Grammatical form is not confined to an individual meaning of the word because grammatical meaning is very abstract and general ex: oats-wheat: The grammatical form of oats is clearly plural and grammatical form of wheat is singular, but we can’t say that oats are more than one and wheat is one. So here we say that oats is grammatical. Plural and wheat is grammatical singular. There is no clear one-to-one correspondence between grammatical category of singular and plural and counting them in reality in terms of “one” and “more than one”.

A very vivid example confirming the rightness of this statement is connected with the category of gender with biological sex ex: bull-cow, so the grammatical form presents a division of a word of the principle of expressing a certain grammatical meaning.

Grammatical meaning is a very abstractive generalized meaning, which is linguistically expressed. ex: Peter’s head -the grammatical meaning of the category of case showing the relations between a part and a whole.

Grammatical meaning is always expressed either explicitly or implicitly:

· e.g. pens –meaning of plurality; indicator – the morpheme

· e.g. has been working – the grammatical form indicates continuity and perfection

· e.g. the category of case. The grammatical meaning is here motivated. It shows relations of objects in extra-linguistic world:

For instance: “The book reads well”. Here the grammatical meaning of passivity is expressed implicitly .Here the subject is not active, it can’t be the doer of the action. While the form of the verb is active, the meaning is passive.

Grammatical meaning is a system of expressing the grammatical meaning through the paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms-expressed by grammatical opposition

Different modes of expressing grammatical meaning:

1. inflexions (work-er-o – work-er-s). Homonymy of grammatical morphemes (-ing – Gerund and Participle I);

2. sound alternation (man – men, have - has);

3. analytical means (analytical forms). A discontinuous morpheme. Prof. Barkhudarov thinks that analytical forms are always marked with the help of discontinuous morphemes (have+ -en; be + -ing; be + -en). Criteria to differentiate analytical forms: - The general grammatical meaning of an analytical form comprises all the components of the form. Each component taken separately doesn’t render any information about the general meaning of the form. - There are no syntactic relations between the components of an analytical form. Originally they developed from free syntactic combinations, mainly from some types of compound predicates.

4. Syntactic relations in the context are possible only for the whole form; the components can’t have syntactic relations separately: has never done.

5. suppletivity (I – me, go – went, bad - worse).

The term ‘category’ derives from a Greek word which is otherwise translated as ’predication’ (in the logical, or philosophical, sense of ‘attributing properties’ to things). Traditional categories are: the category of gender, number, person, case, tense, mood, voice.

Grammatical category (GC) - is a system of expressing a generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation or grammatical forms. (Blokh)

The set of grammatical forms constitutes a paradigm. The paradigmatic relations of grammatical forms in a category are exposed in the so-called grammatical opposition. In other words, grammatical category is some total of all the oppositions of words.

· e.g. the category of number. The opposition of 2 forms: pen – pens (z), cats (s), boxes (iz), men, oxen

The opposition is a generalized correlation of lingual forms by means of which a certain function is expressed. The correlated elements must possess two types of features:

Common differential

the basis of contrast immediately express a function in question

The notion of GC is central in Theoretical Grammar, it's very important to single out the GC of different types of speech. For that purpose the oppositional theory was worked out. It was originally formulated as a phonological theory.

 

According to the number of opposed members oppositions can be:

 

Binary More than binary (ternary, quaternary, etc.)

 

Three main qualitative types of opposition:

 

privative (отрицательная) Based on a morph. differential feature which is present in its strong (marked) member (+) and absent in its weak (unmarked) member (–)   work (-) – worked (+) The differential feature is the suff. –(e)d

gradual   A contrastive pair or group of members which are distinguished not by the presence or absence of a feature but by the degree of it big – bigger – biggest (the GC of comparison)

equipollent (равноценный) A contrastive pair or group in which the members are distinguished by different positive features.In morph. it is mostly confined to formal relations am – is – are (correlation of the person forms of the verb to be)

 

In various contextual conditions one member of the opposition can be used instead of the other, counter-member. This phenomenon is called “ oppositional reduction ” or oppositional substitution ”.

e.g. Man conquers nature. (“man” is used in the sg. but it stands for people in general. The weak member of the categorical opposition of number has replaced the stronger member.)

Tonight we start for London. (The opposition “present –future” has been reduced, the weaker member (present) replacing the strong one (future)).

Types of categories

· - notional (of quantity, agent);

· - semantic (of gender, modality);

· - morphological (number and case of nouns; degrees of comparison of adjectives and adverbs; tense, voice, aspect, correlation, mood of verbs);

· - syntactical (of predicativity, of agent).