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Etymological survey of the English word-stock. 3 page

As to familiar quotations, they are different from proverbs in their origin. They come from literature but by and by(поступово) they become part of the language, so that many people using them do not even know that they are quoting, and very few could accurately(точно) name the play or passage on which they are drawing even when they are aware of using a quotation from W.Shakespeare.

The Shakesperian quotations have become and remain extremely numerous - they have contributed enormously to the store of the language. Very many come from "Hamlet", for example: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark; Brevity is the soul of wit; The rest is silence; Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; There are more things in heaven and earth, Haratio.

Some quotations are so often used that they come to be considered cliches. The term is used to denote such phrases as have become hackneyed(банальний) and stale(не новий). Being constantly and mechanically repeated they have lost their original expressiveness. The following are perhaps the most generally recognised: the acid test, ample opportunities, astronomical figures, the arms of Morpheus, to break the ice, the irony of fate, etc.

Lecture 4.

Theme: Grammar in the system of language. Morphology. Parts of speech.

Plan:

1. Language and Speech.

2. Linguistic levels.

3. Practical and theoretical grammar.

4. The main features of an analytical language.

5. Morphology and Syntax.

6. Word.

7. Morpheme.

8. Different approaches to the classification of words.

9. Scerba's classification of words. lO.Notional and functional parts of speech.

 

Питання 19 Language and Speech

Language is a means of forming and storing ideas as reflections of reality and exchanging them in the process of human intercourse(спілкування). It is social by nature.

Language is a system of signs - meaningful units. The sign in language has only potential meaning. It is a system of means of expression:

a) material units (sounds, morphemes, words, word-groups);

b) regularities (rules) of the use of these units.

Language gives expression to human thoughts. Speech is the manifestation (прояв) of the system of language in the process of communication, the use of signs, the act of producing utterances and the utterances themselves. In Speech the potential meaning is made situationally significant as part of the grammatically organized text. Grammar connects Language and Speech as it categorially determines the process of utterance production.

2. Linguistic levels

1. Phonological (determines the material appearance of its significative units);

2. Lexical (the whole set of naming means of language: words, word-groups);

3. Grammatical (the whole set of regularities, determining the combination of naming means in the formation of utterances).

Only the unity of the 3 levels forms a language.

Lingual hierarchy of levels:

I.Morphological

1. phonemic

2. morphemic

3. lexemic

II.Syntactic

4. phrasemic

5. proposemic



6. supra-proposemic

The basic units of the lingual levels:

1. Phoneme - the smallest distinctive(характерний) unit, has no meaning, is not a sign (big -Eig);

2. Morpheme - a minimal meaningful unit (fault-s);

3. Word - the smallest naming unit, a sign;

4. Phrase - a combination of 2 or more syntactically connected words;

5. Sentence - a predicative unit, a sign of a situational event;

6. Textual unity - a combination of separate sentences.

3. Practical and theoretical grammar

Practical grammar provides with a manual of practical mastery(досконале володіння) of the grammatical rules.

Theoretical grammar - description of the grammatical system, it scientifically analyses and defines the grammatical categories, the ways the words are combined.

The "strict" rule: to see isn't used in the Continuous form, but: "For the first time Bobby felt, he was really seeing the man" (A.Christie).

In theoretical grammar we state some facts, analyze them from different angles, and try to explain them. We deal with many theories, many approaches to one and the same phenomenon.

The are 2 plans of language: context (comprises the purely semantic elements);

expression (comprises the material, formed units). Each formal unit has a meaning. No meaning can be realized without some material means of expression. Each grammatical element presents a unity of content and expression, but the correspondence is very complex:

 

habitual action

Present Indefinite form action at the present moment

action taken as a general truth

3rd person, singular

morphemes – s/ es

the plural of the noun

the possessive form

 

Grammatical meaning is an abstract meaning of large meanings of words expressed by the formal grammatical market: "-s" marks plurality (lawyers). Grammatical meaning is typical of grammatical form. Grammatical form is typical of grammatical meaning. One and the same form may express different grammatical meaning: "The Negroes were getting to their feet" The Negroes evokes the idea of black human beings, the doers(виконавець) of the action, the conception of plurality.

Grammatical category - common feature of a linguistic phenomenon of a certain class, having their grammatical form and grammatical meaning, a complicated unity of grammatical form and grammatical content(склад) (the category of number, mood, ect).

Grammatical category is a system of expressing a generalized meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms (marked: .unmarked). Every grammatical category is characterized by the opposition, the categorial meaning and the function. For example, the category of number:

plurality : : singularity

faults: : fault

plurality: : non-plurality

ashes :: foliage

Grammatical forms may be synthetical and analytical. Synthetical:

1. inflection (morphemic changes without changing their lexical meaning: sentence, sentences, sentenced);

2. suppletivity (combining different roots: be, am, is/are, was/were).

English inflection has been gradually simplified(спрощений). It has developed analytical tendencies.

4. The features of an analytical language:

1.few grammatical inflections (case, degrees of comparison, 3rd person, singular, Present Tense, ect);

2.a sparing use of sound alternations(чергування) (foot-feet, get-got);

3.a wide use of prepositions to connect words, to denote relations between object (a man of wealth);

4.a prominent use of word order (rather fixed: S+Pr+DO+IO+Adv.Mod. "The woman accused the boy of stealing books from the library ").

An analytical form consists of two (or more) words but constitutes one sense unit. One element has lexical meaning, the other - grammatical meaning (/ shall exchange it: shall — 1st person, futurity, exchange — обмінювати).

5.Morphology and Syntax.

Morphology studies grammatical classes and groups of words, grammatical categories and the system of forms in which these categories actually exist.

Syntax studies phrases and sentences, the ways in which words may be combined and the relations between the words in combination.

6. Word

The central element of morphology is word.

Word is a grammatical unit that has its form and meaning. Word is a minimal unit of language, that has its positional independence (Maslov); a minimum free form (Bloomfield); a minimal unit that is characterized by its ability to functioning, the largest unit of morpholody (Ivanova).

Word is a sign, a naming unit, a unit of information in the communication process, the articulate sound-symbol, the grammatically arranged combination of sound with meaning; is formed by morphemes, the uninterrupted string of morphemes, an indivisible elementary component of the lexicon of language, the elementary component of the sentence. Word is an autonomous unit of language, in which a particular meaning is associated with a particular sound complex and which is capable of a particular grammar employment and able to form a sentence by itself (Arnold).

7. Morpheme.

The constituent(складова частина) parts of the word are morphemes. Morpheme is a minimal meaningful unit of language without positional independence: un-law-ful (un - the negative prefix, law - the lexical meaning, ful - the adjectival suffix). Morpheme is a minimal lineal meaningful unit with its sound pattern (Smirnitzky). Morpheme is an association of a given meaning with a given sound pattern, a constituent part of a word (Arnold).

Morphemes are classified into roots and affixes. According to their porition affixes are divided into prefixes (im-polite) and suffixes (teach-er-s). According to their functional meaning the suffixes may be subdivided into derivational (acquit+tal) and functional or grammatical (judge+s). The lexical meaning is expressed by the stem (the part of the word without derivational and functional affixes). The stem also expresses the part of speech meaning (Soboleva): Friend friends, friendly, friendship have the stem friend-.

Functional affixes convey grammatical meaning (build different forms of one and the same word, i.e. a paradigm of the word). Paradigm is the system of all grammatical forms characteristic of the word:

testify - ies - ied - ing;

lawyer - lawyers; nice - nicer - nicest.

"Zero" morpheme (Smirnitzky) or "zero exponent" (Maslov): стіл-, стол-а, стол-ом, стол-у; teach-er, teach-er-s.

As the word teacher may have the suffix -s in the plural form, Smirnitzky finds 3 morphemes in it (teach+er+zero morpheme). But there is no sound image, no graphical representation of the zero morpheme, it can't be separated from the word, the "meaningful absence of the morpheme" is derived from the context but the latter can't express the meaning of the "zero exponent". As there is no graphical representation, no sound image, no meaning of its own, we can't distinguish any "zero morpheme or exponent".

Питання 20 8. Different approaches to the classification of words

All the words of a language fall into some lexico-grammatical classes traditionally called parts of speech. But in Chinese there are no parts of speech. Any monosyllable may be any part of speech. Strict word order helps to solve the problem of parts of speech.

The attitude of different linguists with regard to parts of speech and the basis for their classification varies a great deal:

I. The only criterion of their classification should be the morphological form of words. Sweet (the author of the first scientific grammar of English) divided the parts of speech into 2 main groups:

1. Declinable(відмінювані) (noun, adjective, verb);

2. Indeclinables(невідмінювані) (adverb, preposition, conjunction, interjection);

But: acquittals_ - milk^ bigger, biggest, lexemic^ defended, cut_. One and the same part of speech belongs to different classes (acquittals ~ to declinables, milk — to indeclinables, etc.).

II.The classification is based upon the syntactical functioning of the words (Sweet):

Noun-words include nouns, noun-pronouns(займенник), noun-numerals, infinitive, gerund;

Adjective-words: adjectives, adjective-pronouns, adjective-numerals, participles(дієприкметник,дієприслівник);

Verb-words: finite(особові) forms of the verb, verbals(віддієслівний).

Infinitive and gerund belong both to noun-words and to verb-words. Adverbs(прислівник) are parts of the sentence and they are united with conjunctions(сполучник), prepositions(прийменник) and interjections(вигук) (but they are not parts of the sentence) into one group.

III.The classification is based on relations among words. Yespersen (the author of Essentials of English Grammar. L., 1933; "The Philosophy of Grammar", L., 1968) put forward the theory of three ranks: a furiously barking dog: "dog" - a primary, head word; "barking" - a secondary word, immediately determining the primary; "furiously" - a tertiary word, dependent on the secondary.

But this classification is based on the relations among words in units larger than a word, i.e. in a phrase (phrase is a syntactic unit).

IV. The system of classes is based on the position of words in the sentence (Ch.Fries "The Structure of English"):

 

Group A Class I Class II Class III Class IV
The concert was good there
Their walking seemed to start from the beginning
John's to have breakfast   in the hall for her
This she/it   over  
One others   at 2 o'clock  

There were 4 classes and 15 groups in his system. Different words belonging to different lexico-grammatical classes may be used in one the same position in the sentence. One and the same word may be in different classes and in different groups.

V. The classification is based on form and word order (G.Gleason, the author of "An Introduction to Descriptive Linguistics, 1965):

1. With form markers (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs);

2. Without them.

According to this theory "beautiful" belongs to the second class as it has no inflexions -er, -est, and "easy" - to the first class (easier, easiest). Thus, one and the same part of speech may belong to different lexico-grammatical classes. G.Sledd ("A Short Introduction to English Grammar", 1956) defines inflexional and positional classes (nominals, verbals, adjectivals, adverbials, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, etc.) Interrogative pronouns are united into one separate class (due to their lexical meaning). Both Gleason and Sledd draw much attention to word building suffixes as markers of parts of speech and the heterogeneity of features of some members in the lexico-grammatical class.

All attempts of establishing the classification based on one principal ended in failure.

9. Scerba's classification of words.

VI. The classification based on lexical meaning, morphological form and syntactic function (L.Scerba).

The term "parts of speech" was introduced in the grammatical teaching of ancient Greece when language and speech were not differentiated and there was no concept of sentence yet.

The semantic criterion: the generalized meaning of the words belonging to a given part of speech, i.e. the categorial meaning of the part of speech.

The formal criterion: the specific inflexional and derivational features of the words belonging to a given part of speech.

The functional criterion: the syntactic role of words in the sentence typical of a given part of speech.

10. Notional(значущий) and functional parts of speech.

Parts of speech may be divided into notional (fully lexical, self-dependent functions in the sentence): Noun, Adjective, Numeral, Pronoun(займенник), Verb, Adverb(прислівник); and functional (incomplete nominative meaning, non-self-dependent functions in the sentence): Article, Preposition(прийменник), Conjunction, Particle(частка), Modal Word, Interjection(вигук).

Why is it so difficult to classify parts of speech? Each part of speech has some typical characteristics - the highly organized nucleus, but there may be some peripheral features different from the typical ones. Sledd and Gleason pointed to rather complex relations between the words of one part of speech. Admony of Leningrad puts forward the theory of grammatical field (1974). Every part of speech has the nucleus and the periphery.

The theory of semantic fields has been worked out by Trier, Vicegerber and some other linguists; and the theory of lexico-grammatical field - by the Soviet grammarians Guliga, Shendels, Bondarko, Guhman.

The boundaries between different parts of speech are not clear out:

notional - I have a ticket to the theatre, have

auxiliary(допоміжні) - I have quitted my studies.

The most typical features of the part of speech are introduced by the categorial meaning, form, function, combinability with other parts of speech:

Noun - the catagorial meaning of substance or thingness (lawyer, milk)\

- the changeable forms of number and case;

- specific derivational suffixes;

- the substantive functions in the sentence: the subject, an object, a substantival predicative;

- prepositional connections;

- modified by an adjective;

- determined(визначати) by an article;

- combinability with a verb

Lecture 5

Theme: Syntax. Types of sentences in English.

Plan:

1. Sentence: General.

2. Actual division of the sentence.

3. Communicative types of sentences.

4. Simple sentence: constituent structure.

5. Simple sentence: paradigmatic structure.

6. Composite sentence as a polypredicative construction.

7. Complex sentence.

8. Compound sentence.

9. Semi-complex and semi-compound sentences.

10. Sentence in the text.

Питання 21. Sentence: General

The sentence is the immediate integral unit of speech built up of words according to a definite syntactic pattern(синтаксична модель) and distinguished by a contextually relevant communicative purpose. The sentence is the main object of syntax as part of the grammatical theory.

The sentence, being composed of words, may in certain cases include only one word of various lexico-grammatical standings. Cf: Night. Congratulations. Away! Why? Certainly.

While the word is a component element of the word-stock and as such is a nominative unit of language, the sentence, linguistically, is a predicative utterance-unit. It means that the sentence not only names some referents with the help of its word-constituents, but also, first, presents these referents as making up a certain situation, or, more specifically, a situational event, and second, reflects the connection between the nominal denotation of the event, on the one hand, and objective reality, on the other, showing the time of the event, its being real or unreal, desirable or undesirable, necessary or unnecessary, etc.

There is another difference between the sentence and the word. Namely, unlike the word, the sentence does not exist in the system of language as a ready-made unit; with the exception of a limited number of utterances of phraseological citation, it is created by the speaker in the course of communication. So sentence is a unit of speech.

Being a unit of speech, the sentence is intonationally delimited. Intonation separates one sentence from another in the continual flow of uttered segments and, together with various segmental means of expression, participates in rendering essential communicative-predicative meaning (such as, for instance, the syntactic meaning of interrogation in distinction to the meaning of declaration).

The sentence is characterized by its specific category of predication, which establishes the relation of the named phenomena to actual life. The general semantic category of modality is also defined by linguists as exposing the connection between the named objects and surrounding reality.

The centre of predication in a sentence of verbal type (which is the predominant type of sentence-structure in English) is a finite verb. The finite verb expresses essential predicative meanings by its categorial forms, first of all, the categories of tense and mood.

The sentence as a lingual unit performs two essential sigmemic (meaningful) functions: first, substance-naming, or nominative function; second, reality-evaluating, or predicative function.

2. Actual division of the sentence.

The notional(значущий) parts of the sentence referring to the basic elements of the reflected situation form, taken together, the nominative meaning of the sentence. The main components of the actual division of the sentence are the theme and the rheme. The theme(що відомо) expresses the starting point of the communication, i.e. it denotes an object or a phenomenon about which something is reported. The rheme(нове) expresses the basic informative part of the communication, its contextually relevant centre.

The Theme of the actual division of the sentence may or may not coincide with the subject of the sentence. The rheme of the actual division, in its turn, may or may not coincide with the predicate of the sentence - either with the whole predicate group or its part, such as the predicative, the object, the adverbial.

The actual division of the sentence finds its full expression only in a concrete context of speech, therefore it is sometimes referred to as the "contextual" division of the sentence.

3. Communicative types of sentences.

The sentence is a communicative unit, therefore the primary classification of sentences must be based on the communicative principle. This principle is formulated in traditional grammar as the "purpose of communication".

In accord with the purpose of communication three cardinal sentence-types are recognized in linguistic tradition: first, the declarative sentence(розповідне); second, the imperative (inducive) sentence(наказове); third, the interrogative sentence(питальне). The declarative sentence expresses a statement, either affirmative or negative. The imperative sentence expresses inducement, either affirmative or negative. That is, it urges the listener, in the form of request or command to perform or not to perform a certain action. The interrogative sentence expresses a question, i.e. a request for information wanted by the speaker from the listener.

Alongside the three cardinal communicative sentence-types, another type of sentences is recognized in the theory of syntax, namely, the so-called exclamatory sentence. Each of the cardinal communicative sentence-types can be represented in the two variants: non-exclamatory and exclamatory.

Питання 22 4. Simple sentence: constituent structure.

The basic predicative meanings of the typical English sentence are expressed by the finite verb, which is immediately connected with the subject of the sentence. This predicative connection is commonly referred to as the "predicative line" of the sentence. Depending on their predicative complexity, sentences can feature one predicative line or several (more than one) predicative lines; in other words, sentences may be, respectively, "monopredicative" and "polypredicative". Using this distinction, we must say that the simple sentence is a sentence in which only one predicative line is expressed. E.g.: Bob has never left the stadium. Opinions differ. This may happen any time.

According to this definition, sentences with several predicates referring to one and the same subject cannot be considered as simple. E.g.: I took the child in my arms and held him.

Sentences having one verb-predicate and more than one subject to it, if the subjects form actually separate (though) interdependent) predicative connections, cannot be considered as simple, either. E.g.: The door was open, and also the front window.

The nominative parts of the simple sentence, each occupying a notional position in it, are subject, predicate, object, adverbial, attribute, parenthetical enclosure, addressing enclosure. The parts are arranged in a hierarchy, wherein all of them perform some modifying role.

Thus, the subject is a person-modifier of the predicate. The predicate(присудок) is a process-modifier of the subject-person. The object is a substance-modifier of a processual part (actional or statal). The adverbial is a quality-modifies (in a broad sense) of a processual part or the whole of the sentence). The attribute is a quality-modifier of a substantive part. The parenthetical enclosure is a detached speaker-bound modifier of any sentence-part or the whole of the sentence. The addressing enclosure (address) is a substantive modifier of the destination of the sentence and hence, from its angle, a modifier of the sentence as a whole.

The subject-group and the predicative-group of the sentence are its two constitutive "members" (составы предложения). According as both members are present in the composition of the sentence or only one of them, sentences are classed into 'two-member" and "one-member" ones.

Elliptical sentences in which the subject or the predicate is contextually omitted, are analysed as "two-member" sentences.

The semantic classification of simple sentences should be effected at least on the three bases: first, on the basis of the subject categorial meanings; second, on the basis of the predicate categorial meanings; third, on the basis of the subject-object relation.

Reflecting the categories of the subject, simple sentences are divided into personal and impersonal.

Reflecting the categories of the predicate, simple sentences are divided into process featuring ("verbal") and, in the broad sense, substance featuring (including substance as such and substantive quality - "nominal").

Reflecting the subject-object relation, simple sentences should be divided into subjective (John lives in London), objective (John reads a book) and neutral or "potentially " objective (John reads).

Питання 23 5. Composite(складне) sentence as a polypredicative construction.

The composite sentence, as different from the simple sentence, is formed by two or more predicative lines. Being a polypredicative construction, it expresses a complicated act of thought, i.e. an act of mental activity which falls into two or more intellectual efforts closely combined with one another. In terms of situations and events this means that the composite sentence reflects two or more elementary situational events viewed as making up a unity.

Each predicative unit in a composite sentence makes up a clause in it.

As is well known, the use of the composite sentences, especially long and logically intricate ones, is characteristic of literary written speech rather than colloquial oral speech.

Composite sentences display two principal types of construction: subordination(підрядність) and coordination(сурядність). By coordination the clauses(речення) are arranged as units of syntactically equal rank; by subordination, as units of unequal rank, one being categorically dominated by the other.

The means of combining clauses into a polypredicative sentence are divided into syndetic(сполучниковий), i.e. conjunctional, and asyndetic(безсполучниковий), i.e. non-conjunctional.

All composite sentences are to be classed into compound sentences (coordination their clauses) (складно сурядні) and complex sentences (subordinating their clauses) (складно підрядні).

6. Complex sentence.

The complex sentence is a polypredicative construction built up on the principle of subordination. It is derived from two or more base sentences one of which performs the role of a matrix in relation to the others, the insert sentences. When joined into one complex sentence, the matrix base sentence becomes the principal clause of it and the insert sentences, its subordinate clauses.


Date: 2015-01-02; view: 1086


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