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Grammatical category. Grammatical meaning. Grammatical formLecture 1 Fundamentals of grammar 1. Grammatical category. Grammatical meaning. Grammatical form. 2. Theory of oppositions. Types of oppositions. Oppositions in morphology. 3. Morpheme. Derivation morphemes and inflection morphemes. 4. Distributional analysis. Morphemic analysis. IC-analysis. Grammatical category. Grammatical meaning. Grammatical form The general notions of grammar which determine the structure of language and find their expression in inflection and other devices are generally called grammatical categories. As is known, a grammatical category is generally represented by at least two grammatical forms, otherwise it cannot exist. A simple case of oppositions in pairs of grammatical forms will be found, for instance, between the Singular and the Plural in nouns, or between Active and Passive in verbs. A grammatical categoryis a unit of grammar based on a morphological opposition of grammatical meanings presented in grammatical forms. It is more or less universally recognised that word-meaning is not homogeneous but is made up of various components the combination and the interrelation of which determine to a great extent the inner facet of the word. These components are usually described as types of meaning. The two main types of meaning that are readily observed are the grammatical and the lexical meanings to be found in words and word-forms. The most general meanings rendered by language and expressed by systemic correlations of word-forms are interpreted in linguistics as grammatical meanings. Grammatical meaningsare very abstract, very general. Therefore the grammatical form is not confined to an individual word, but unites a whole class of words, so that each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its individual, concrete semantics. Grammatical meanings ranged in oppositions and presented in grammatical forms build grammatical categories. Grammatical formscan be morphemes, synthetic forms, and grammatical word combinations, which are analytical forms. Synthetic forms unite both lexical and grammatical meanings in one word. In analytical forms there two or more words in which at least one element is an auxiliary. The auxiliary is a constant element of an analytical structure, which is devoid of lexical meaning (it renders grammatical meanings and is a purely grammatical element). Analytical structures must be differentiated from free syntactical word combinations. In free syntactical word combinations all the elements possess both lexical and grammatical meanings. Cf. waiter and waitress The distinctions of gender in Russian are universal. They refer to all the vocabulary of the language. In English this distinction is not a grammatical phenomenon. The grammatical category of gender is lost. What we have now is some gender distinctions existing as the remnant of history. The distinction “waiter vs. waitress” is not universal enough to build up a grammatical category. It does not possess the level of grammatical abstraction characterized by an unlimited range of occurrence. Cf. book and books -s is a form-building morpheme that builds a grammatical form because it is characterized by the level of grammatical abstraction realized in an unlimited range of occurrence. Types of word-form derivation These fall under two main headings: (a) those limited to changes in the body of the word, without having recourse to auxiliary words (synthetic types), (b) those implying the use of auxiliary words (analytical types). Besides, there are a few special cases of different forms of a word being derived from altogether different stems. Synthetic Types The number of morphemes used for deriving word-forms in Modern English is very small (much smaller than either in German or in Russian, for instance. There is the ending -s (-es), with three variants of pronunciation and the endings -en and -ren, in one or two words each, viz. oxen, brethren (poet.), children. There is the ending -'s, with the same three variants of pronunciation as for the plural ending, used to form what is generally termed the genitive case of nouns. For adjectives, there are the endings -er and -est for the degrees of comparison. For verbs, there is the ending -s (-es) for the third person singular present indicative, with the same three variants of pronunciation noted above for nouns, the ending -d (-ed) for the past tense of certain verbs (with three variants of pronunciation, again), the ending -d (ed) for the second participle of certain verbs, the ending -n (-en) for the second participle of certain other verbs, and the ending -ing for the first participle and also for the gerund. Thus the total number of morphemes used to derive forms of words is eleven or twelve, which is much less than the number found in languages of a mainly synthetical structure. It should also be noted that most of these endings are mono-semantic, in the sense that they denote only one grammatical category and not two or three (or more) at a time, as is the case in synthetic languages. For example, the plural -s (or -es) denotes only the category of plural number, and has nothing to do with any other grammatical category, such as case. Sound Alternations Sound alternations are a way of expressing grammatical categories which consists in changing a sound inside the root. This method appears in Modern English, for example, in nouns, as when the root vowel [au] of mouse is changed into [aı] in mice, etc. This method is much more extensively used in verbs, such as write — wrote — written, sing — sang — sung, meet — met — met, etc. On the whole, vowel alternation does play some part among the means of expressing grammatical categories, though its part in Modern English has been much reduced as compared to Old English. Analytical Types These consist in using a word (devoid of any lexical meaning of its own) to express some grammatical category of another word. There can be no doubt in Modern English about the analytical character of such formations as, e. g., has invited or is invited, or is inviting, or does not invite. The verbs have, be, and do have no lexical meaning of their own in these cases. The lexical meaning of the formation resides in the participle or infinitive following the verb have, be or do. Some doubt has been expressed about the formations shall invite and will invite. There is a view that shall and will have a lexical meaning. While the existence of analytical forms of the English verb cannot be disputed, the existence of such forms in adjectives and adverbs is not nowadays universally recognised. The question whether such formations as more vivid, the most vivid, or, again, more vividly and most vividly are or are not analytical forms of degrees of comparison of vivid and vividly, is controversial. We can only say here that if these formations are recognised as analytical forms of degrees of comparison, the words more and most have to be numbered among the analytical means of morphology. Date: 2015-12-17; view: 4009
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