Free bound overt covert discontinuous

can build words by themselves hand + ful

cannot build words by them­selves

have material explicit morph clock + s

don’t have material shape zero morph clock + 0

singled out by Barkhu­darov aux. element + f-build­ing signal of the notional element. The root-morph. is not included have + en

 

The sound alternation (replacive morpheme) is a way of expressing grammatical category by changing a sound inside the root. Suppletive formation is building a form of a word by different stems: good-better/go-went

Planes of language.

For better understanding the nature of grammar it is important to discriminate the 2 planes of language: the plane of content and the plane of expression.

The plane of content comprises the purely semantic elements contained in language. The plane of expression comprises the material (formal) units of language taken by themselves, without their meaning. The 2 planes are inseparably connected, so that no meaning can be realized without some material means of expression. On the other hand the correspondence between the planes of content and expression is very complex. This complexity is clearly illustrated by the phenomena of polysemy, homonymy and synonymy.

In case of polysemy (спинка-спинка) and homonymy (ключ-ключ) two or more units of plane of content correspond to one unit of plane of expression. In case of synonymy two or more plane of expression correlate to one plane of content.

Lingual units stand to one another in two fundamental types of relations: syntagmatic and paradigmatic. Syntagmatic relations are linear relations between units in a segmental sequence. Morphemes in the words are connected syntagmatically.

Syntagma is a combination of 2 words. There are 4 main types of notional syntagmas:

· predicative (subject and predicate)

· objective (verb and it’s object)

· attributive (noun and it’s attribute)

· adverbial (modified notional words as a verb, adjective or adverb with it’s adverbial modifiers).

The other type of relations is called paradigmatic. They exist between elements of the system outside the strings where they co-occur.

Chapter 4. Parts of Speech. Various Principles of Classification

 

The words of the language are divided into grammatical classes which differ in formal and semantic features. Traditionally they are called parts of speech (p/of/sp). This term is purely conventional and was introduced in the grammatical teaching of Ancient Greece.

The problem of the parts of speech is the most controversial one.

The first principle is called the Semantic Approach.

In many schools the semantic principle was used for p/of/sp classification. It is based on the universal forms of human thought which are reflected in 3 main categorial meanings of words:

1) substance (предметность)

2) process (процессуальность)

3) property (свойства, качества)

In Medieval linguistics (Пор-Рояль, 1660) p/of/sp are defined as invariants of the substance-logical plane. However, this principle is open to criticism; it doesn’t always work; it can be hard to define a categorial meaning of a word. e.g. whiteness - is it substance of a noun or property of an adjective?

action – it denotes process, but it isn’t a verb

The second principle, the Formal Approach states that only form should be used as a criterion for the classification of the p/of/sp. (Henry Sweet, Cruisinga).

They distinguished between two classes of words:

Declinable indeclinable

(changeable forms) (static forms)

articles, prepositions must

This criterion is also unreliable. It doesn’t take into account the way a word functions in the sentence. Must functions as many other verbs, for instance shall which has a declinable form.

This approach has limitations:

1) p/of/sp are morphological classes (Фортунатов), which means they are words with a similar paradigm. But this fact cannot be applied to the language such as Chinese, where morphological system is non-existent or poorly-developed.

2) p/of/sp are grammatical word classes (Реформатский), he takes into account their morphological an syntactical properties (form and function). This is the borderline between the second and the third approaches

According to the third principle, the Syntactic (Functional) Approach only the syntactic function of a word should be taken into consideration as a criterion for p/of/sp classification.

 

Charles Fries’ has also worked out the principles of syntactico-distributional (s-d) classification of English words. He was the follower of the famous linguist L. Bloomfield.

The s-d classification of words is based on the study of their combinability by means of substitution testing. The testing results in developing the standard model of four main “positions” of notional words in the English sentence:

· noun (N)

· verb (V)

· adjective (A)

· adverb (D)

For his materials he chose tape recorded spontaneous conversation (250,000 word entries or 50 hours of talk). The words isolated from the records were tested on the three typical sentences (also taken from the tapes), which are used as substitution test-frames.

Frame A. The concert was good (always). [The thing and its quality at a given time]

Frame B. The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly). [“Actor-action-thing acted upon” –characteristic of the action]

Frame C. The team went there. [“Actor-action-direction of the action”]

As a result of those tests the following lists of words were established:

Class 1. (A) concert, coffee, taste, container, difference, etc. (B) clerk, husband, supervisor, etc.; tax, food, coffee, etc. (C) team, husband, woman, etc.

Class 2. (A) was, seemed, became, etc. (B) remembered, wanted, saw, suggested etc. (C) went, came, ran, lived, worked, etc.

Class 3. (A) good, large, necessary, foreign, new empty, etc.

Class 4. (A) there, here, always, then, sometimes, etc. (B) clearly, sufficiently, especially, repeatedly, soon, etc. (C) there, back, out, etc.; rapidly, eagerly, confidently, etc.

All these words can fill in the positions of the frames without affecting their general structural meaning. Repeated interchanges in the substitutions of the primarily identified positional (notional) words in different collocations determine their morphological characteristics.

Functional words are exposed in the cited process as being unable to fill in the positions of the frames without destroying their structural meaning. These words form limited groups totaling 154 units. They can be distributed among the three main sets:

1) specifiers of notional words (determiners of nouns, modal verbs, functional modifiers and intensifiers of adjectives and adverbs)

2) interpositional elements, determining the relation of notional words to one another (prepositions and conjunctions)

3) refer to the sentence as a whole (question words, attention-getting words, words of affirmation and negation, sentence introducers (it, there)

The classification of p/of/sp suggested by Russian grammarians is based on three principles on which the classification is based:

Meaning

the meaning common to all the words of a given class and constituting its essence.

e.g. thingness of nouns

process of verbs

Form

the morphological characteristics of a type of word

e.g. noun is characterized by the category of number

prepositions, conjunctions and others are characterized by invariability

Function

the syntactical properties of a type of word

the method of combining with other words (deals with phrases)

its function in the sentence (deals with sentences)

Some grammarians think that words should be divided into two categories on the following principle:

notional words denote things, actions and other extra-linguistic phenomena

functional words denote relations and connections between the notional words

This view is shaky, because functional words can also express something extra-linguistic:

e.g. The match was called off because it was raining. (the conjunction because denotes the connection between two processes).

Some words belonging to a particular p/of/sp may perform a function differing from that which characterizes the p/of/sp as a whole.

e.g. I have some money left. (have – a notional word)

I have found a dog. (have – an auxiliary verb used to form a certain analytical form of the verb to find, i.e. it is a functional verb)

Notional

Here belong:

· the noun

1) the categorial meaning of substance

2) the forms of number and case; the specific suffixal forms of derivation

3) the substantive functions in the sentence (subject, object, substantival predicative); prepositional connections, modification by an adjective.

· the adjective

1) the categorial meaning of property

2) the forms of degrees of comparison, the specific suffixal forms of derivation

3) adjectival functions in the sentence (attribute to a noun, adjectival predicative)

· the numeral

1) the categorial meaning of number (cardinal and ordinal)

2) the narrow set of simple numerals; the specific forms of composition for compound numerals; the specific suffixal forms of derivation for ordinal numerals

3) the functions of numerical attribute and numerical substantive

· the pronoun

1) the categorial meaning of indication (deixis)

2) the narrow sets of various status with the corresponding formal properties of categorial changeability and word-building

3) the substantival and adjectival functions for different sets

· the verb

1) the categorial meaning of process (presented in the two upper series of forms, respectively, as finite process and non-finite process)

2) the forms of the verbal categories of person, number, tense, aspect, voice, mood; the opposition of the finite and non-finite forms

3) the function of the finite predicate for the finite verb; the mixed verbal - other than verbal functions for the non-finite verb

· the adverb

1) the calegorial meaning of the secondary property, i.e. the property of process or another property

2) the forms of the degrees of comparison for qualitative adverbs; the specific suffixal forms of derivation

3) the functions of various adverbial modifiers

The unity of notional lexemes can be demonstrated by the following four-stage series reflected in regular phrase correlations:

a recognizing note – a notable recognition – to note recognizingly – to recognize notably

This can be symbolically expressed by the formula:

 

St (n.v.a.d) St – morphemic stem, n – noun, v – verb, a – adjective, d - adverb

e.g. nation – to nationalize – national – nationally

friend – to befriend- friendly – friendly

The general order of classes in the series evidently corresponds to the logic of mental perception of reality.

It is possible to speak of lexemes with a complete paradigm of nomination and lexemes with an incomplete paradigm of nomination. Some words may even stand apart from this paradigm (to be nominatively isolated, e.g. some simple adverbs). On the other hand, the universal character of the nomination paradigm is sustained by suppletive completion, both lexemic and phrasemic.

e.g. an end – to end – final – finally

good – goodness – well – to better

Pronouns are traditionally recognized on the basis of indicatory (deictic) and substitutional semantic functions. The two types of meanings form a unity, in which the deictic semantics is primary. As a matter of fact, indication is the semantic foundation of substitution.

The generalizing substitutional function of pronouns makes them into syntactic representatives of all the notional classes of words, so that a pronominal positional part of the sentence serves as a catcgorial projection of the corresponding notional subclass identified as the filler set of the position in question.

Symbolically the correlation of the nominal and pronominal paradigmatic schemes is stated as follows:

N – V – A – D – Npro – Vpro – Apro – Dpro.

 

Functional

These are words of incomplete nominative meaning and non-self-dependent, mediatory functions in the sentence.

Here belong:

· the article

expresses the specific limitation of the substantive functions

· the preposition

expresses the dependencies and interdependencies of substantive referents

· the conjunction

expresses connections of phenomena

· the particle

unites the functional words of specifying and limiting meaning. To this series, alongside other specifying words, should be referred verbal postpositions as functional modifiers of verbs, etc.

· the modal word

expresses the attitude of the speaker to the reflected situation and its parts. Here belong the functional words of probability (probably, perhaps, etc.), of qualitative evaluation (fortunately, unfortunately, luckily, etc.), and also of affirmation and negation

· the interjection

is a signal of emotions

The essence of the paradigmatic status of the functional words in the light of syntactic interpretation consists in the fact that the lists of functional words may be regarded as paradigmatic series themselves - which, in their turn, are grammatical constituents of higher paradigmatic series at the level of phrases and especially sentences.

As a matter of fact, functional words, considered by their role in the structure of the sentence, are proved to be exposers of various syntactic categories, i.e. they render structural meanings referring to phrases and sentences in constructional forms similar to derivational (word-building) and relational (grammatical) morphemes in the composition of separate words.

e.g. The words were obscure, but she understood the uneasiness that produced them. –> The words were obscure, weren't they? How then could she understand the uneasiness that produced them? –> Or perhaps the words were not too obscure, after all? Or, conversely, she didn't understand the uneasiness that produced them?

The functional words are identified not by their morphemic composition, but by their semantico-syntactic features in reference to the embedding constructions.

Chapter 5. Noun.

The Noun and Its Categories

· One of the largest classes of words.

· An open class.

· As a part of speech it has the categorial meaning of ‘thingness’, ‘substance’ (e.g. a table, a man, a book – music, paleness, beauty). Field theory: the nucleus – concrete nouns which denote living beings, then nouns denoting objects, further in the periphery – abstract nouns, verbal nouns, gerunds.

· Morphemic structure (typical stem-building elements – suffixes –er, -ist, -ess, -ee; -ness, -ion,- ity, -ance, -ment; conversion to love - love). Practically any word can be substantivised: must – a must; to export – export.

· Functional properties: the most characteristic substantive functions of the noun are that of the subject and that of the object. Other syntactic functions: attribute, adverbial, predicative.

· Combinability: with articles, other determinants (demonstrative, possessive, indefinite pronouns), with nouns (prepositional combinability – an entrance to the house, casal combinability – the president’s speech, sheer contact – a sports event, film festivals), with adjectives (prepositive and postpositive), with verbs.