Theoretical English Grammar PDF

Section I Theoretical English Grammar as a Branch of Linguistics 1. On the History of English Grammars Until the 17th century the term “grammar” in English was applied only to the study of Latin. Latin grammar was the only grammar learned in schools (grammar schools). Until the end of the 16th cent...

Section I Theoretical English Grammar as a Branch of Linguistics 1. On the History of English Grammars Until the 17th century the term “grammar” in English was applied only to the study of Latin. Latin grammar was the only grammar learned in schools (grammar schools). Until the end of the 16th century there were no grammars of English. One of the most popular Latin grammars was written in English by William Lily. It was published in the first half of the 16th century and went through many editions. This book was very important for English grammar as it set a standard for the arrangement of material. Latin grammatical paradigms with their English equivalents made possible the presentation of English forms in a similar way, using the same terminology as in Latin grammar. Lily’s “Latin Grammar” may be considered as the precursor of the earliest English grammars. The first English grammar was written by William Bullokar (“Bref Grammar for English”, 1585). There were 5 cases of nouns in Bullokar’s grammar (cf. 6 cases in Latin). However, even early grammarians noticed some typical features which made the structure of English different from that of Latin. Generally speaking, the history of English grammars may be divided into two periods. The first is the age of prescientific grammar beginning with the end of the 16th century and lasting till about 1900. It includes two types of grammars which succeeded each other. The first type of grammars in the history of English grammar is represented by early prenormative grammars of English (the first among them is W. Bullokar’s “Bref Grammar for English”). 7 By the middle of the 18th century, when many of the grammatical phenomena of English had been described and the English language norms established, the prenormative grammars gave way to a new kind of grammar, a prescriptive (normative) grammar. It stated strict rules of grammatical usage and set up a certain standard of correctness to be followed by learners. One of the most influential grammars of that period was R. Lowth’s “Short Introduction to English Grammar”, first published in 1762 in London. On the other side of the Atlantic, in New York, Lindley Murray wrote a very successful work, “English Grammar Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners”. It was first published in 1795 and later underwent 50 editions in its original form and more than 120 – in an abridged version. Some of the 19th-century normative grammars were reprinted in the 20th century. For example, W. Lennie’s “Principles of English Grammar” underwent numerous editions, the 99th edition being published in 1905; or, else, J. C. Nesfield’s grammar (“English Grammar Past and Present”, 1898) underwent twenty five editions in different variants and was still on sale in the 1960s. Grammars of the second type (prescriptive, or normative grammars) written by modern authors are usually referred to as practical grammars of English. By the end of the 19th century, when the system of grammar known in modern linguistics as traditional had been established, there appeared a new type of grammar (the third on the list), the scientific grammar. In contrast with prescriptive grammars, the classical scientific grammar was both descriptive and explanatory. H. Sweet’s grammar book appeared in the last decade of the 19th century (H. Sweet, “A New English Grammar, Logical and Historical”. Part I. Oxford, 1892; Part II. Oxford, 1898). The title of the book speaks for itself, so it is common practice nowadays to take the date of 1900 as the dividing line between the two periods in the history of English grammars and the beginning of the age of the scientific grammar. Classical scientific grammar accepted the traditional grammatical system of prescriptive grammars. During the first half of the 20th century, an intensive development of scientific English grammar took place, with great contributions to it being made by O. Jespersen (“The Philosophy of Grammar”, 1924; “Essentials of English Grammar”, 1933; “A Modern English Grammar on Historical 8 Principles”, 7 vols, 1914–1949), E. Kruisinga (“A Handbook of PresentDay English”, 1909), H. Poutsma (“A Grammar of Late Modern English”, 5 vols, 1904–1929), C. T. Onions (“An Advanced English Syntax”, 1904), G. O. Curme (“A Grammar of the English Language”, 1931) and some other scholars. In the 1950s a new trend in linguistic studies came to the fore, the structural grammar (the forth on the list). It was very popular with grammarians for about 40 years and took different directions in its development which are known as Descriptive Linguistics, Transformational Grammar, Generative Grammar, Generative Semantics. The main ideas of structural approach to language were advanced by Ferdinand de Saussure (“Cours de linguistique generale”, 1922) and Leonard Bloomfield (“Language”, 1933). Those ideas were accepted and further developed by H. Whitehall (“Structural Essentials of English”, 1956), Z. S. Harris (“Methods in Structural Linguistics”, 1961), Ch. C. Fries (“The Structure of English”, 1963), H. A. Gleason (“Linguistics and English Grammar”, 1965), E. Bach (“An Introduction to Transformation Grammars”, 1964), N. Chomsky (“Syntactic Structures”, 1957; “Language and Mind”, 1968), and a great number of other linguists. When comparing the two periods in the history of English grammars, one can see that during the first period (the 17th — 19th centuries) there was only one kind of grammar in use at a time, whereas in the 20th century there were several types of grammatical descriptions used and developed in parallel. The coexistence and a certain interaction of different types of grammars is a typical feature of the second period (the scientific one). Among modern trends we cannot but mention the communicative grammar (the fifth on the list), which has been gaining popularity since the 1980s. In grammar books of this type the grammatical structures are systematically related to meanings, uses, and situations of communication. Working bibliography Iofik L. L. Readings in the Theory of English Grammar / L. L. Iofik [et al.]. Leningrad, 1981. P. 5–40. Leech G. A Communicative Grammar of English / G. Leech, J. Starvik. Moscow, 1983. P. 5–8. 9 2. Fundamental Ideas and Main Schools of Structural Linguistics The first linguists to speak of language as a system or a structure of smaller systems were Beaudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929) of Russia and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). The work that came to be most widely known is de-Suassure’s “Cours de linguistique generale” (Course in General Linguistics), posthumously compiled from his students’ lecture-notes. De-Saussure’s main ideas are as follows: 1. Language is a system of signals (linguistic signs), interconnected and interdependent. It is this network of interdependent elements that forms the object of linguistics as an independent science. 2. Language as a system of signals may be compared to other systems of signals (e.g. military signals). Thus, language may be considered as the object of a more general science — semeiology — a science of different systems of signals used in human societies. 3. Language has two aspects: the system of language and the manifestation of this system in social intercourse — speech. The system of language is a body of linguistic units (sounds, affixes, words, etc), grammar rules, and the rules of lexical series. Speech is the total of our utterances and texts. It is based on the system of language. Speech is the linear (syntagmatic) aspect of language, while the system of language is its paradigmatic aspect (“associative” as de Saussure called it). 4. The linguistic sign is bilateral, i.e. it has both form and meaning. We understand the meaning of the linguistic sign as reflecting the objects, events, situations of the outside world. 5. The linguistic sign is “absolutely arbitrary” (in the sense that there is nothing obligatory in the relation of the sound form of the word to the object it denotes) and it is “relatively motivated” (in the sense that in the system of language the linguistic sign is connected with other linguistic signs both in form and meaning). 6. Language is to be studied as a system in the “synchronic plane”, i. e. at a given moment of its existence, in the plane of simultaneous coexistence of its elements. 10 7. The system of language is to be studied on the basis of the oppositions of its units. The units can be found by means of segmenting the flow of speech and comparing the isolated segments. There were three main linguistic schools that further developed these ideas: the Prague School that created Functional Linguistics, the Copenhagen School that created Glossematics, and the American School that gave rise to Descriptive Linguistics, the Immediate Constituent Grammar, and the Transformational Grammar. The Prague School was founded in 1929 by Czech and Russian linguists: Mathesius, Trnka, Trubetzkoy, Jakobson, and some others. Their main contribution to modern linguistics is the technique for determining the units of the phonological level of language. The basic method is the use of oppositions (contrasts) of speech sounds that change the meaning of the words in which they occur. Nikolay Trubetzkoy developed a set of contrast criteria for the identification and classification of phonological oppositions. The most widely known is the binary privative opposition in which one member of the contrastive pair is characterized by the presence of a certain feature that is lacking in the other member. The element possessing the feature in question is called the “marked”, or “strong” member of the opposition, the other is called the “unmarked”, or “weak” member of the opposition. A phoneme is distinguished from all the other phonemes by a set of distinctive (differential) features, e. g. [p] is distinguished from [b] as a voiceless sound. The method of binary oppositions was extended to grammar and widely applied to morphological studies, e. g. Roman Jacobson used the principle of privative opposition for describing the morphological categories of the Russian language. The Copenhagen School was founded in 1933 by Louis Hjelmslev and Viggo Brondal. In the early 1930s the conception of the Copenhagen School was given the name “Glossematics” (from the Greek word glossa — language). In 1943 L. Hjelmslev published his main work which was later translated into English and appeared in Baltimore in 1953 under the title “Prolegomena to a Theory of Language (Principles of Linguistics). A Russian translation was published in 1960. Glossematics tried to give a more exact definition 11 of the object of linguistics. L. Hjelmslev sought to develop a sort of linguistic calculus (исчисление) which might serve linguistics in the same way as mathematics served physical sciences. The object of linguistics was then understood as “language in the abstract”. The ideas of Glossematics have been used in cognitive linguistics, in semantic theory of language. They have made the basis of the componential analysis. Componential analysis is an approach which makes use of semantic components. It seeks to deal with sense relations by means of a single set of constructs. Lexical items are analyzed in terms of semantic features or sense components, treated as binary opposites distinguished by pluses and minuses (+male/-male). The American school of Descriptive Linguistics began in the 1920s — 1930s. It was promoted by the necessity of studying half-known and unknown languages of American Indian tribes. Those languages were dying and had no writing. Being agglomerating, they had little in common with the Indo-European languages. Descriptive linguists had to give up the traditional principles of analysis in terms of the parts of speech and members of the sentence. Some new principles for describing language structures were proposed by E. Sapir (1884 – 1939) and L. Bloomfield (1887–1949). The fundamental work of L. Bloomfield (“Language”) was published in 1933. The author understood language as a system of signals, i. e. linguistic forms by means of which people communicate. However, according to L. Bloomfield meanings of speech forms could be scientifically defined only if all branches of science including psychology and physiology were close to perfection. Until that time linguistic forms are to be described in terms of their position and their co-occurrence in sentences. The study of a language must be objective and based on formal criteria — the distribution of linguistic units (i. e. the contextual environment of linguistic units) and their structural characteristics. The meaning of the utterance can be found through the response of the hearers. A sentence has a grammatical meaning which does not entirely depend on the choice of its wordconstituents. These ideas were further developed by Z. S. Harris, Ch. C. Fries, H. Whitehall, H. A. Gleason, E. Bach, N. Chomsky, Mc. Cawley and many other scholars. For example, Ch. Fries in his 12 book “The Structure of English” (1957) says that it is the classes of words used in the sentence, their formal devices (morphemes), and their positions that signal the structural meaning of the sentence and its parts. To illustrate this he presents a set of sentences with a quite clear grammatical meaning in spite of their being built up of senseless words: Woggles ugged diggles; Uggs woggled digs; Woggs diggled uggs. Cf.: Глокая куздра штеко будланула бокра и куздрячит бокренка (Л. В. Щерба). In fact, the main contribution of American Descriptive School to modern linguistics is the development of the techniques of linguistic analysis, viz. the Distributional method and the IC-method (the method of immediate constituents). The distribution of a linguistic unit is the total of all environments in which it occurs. An immediate constituent is one of the two constituents of which the given linguistic form is directly built up. Immediate constituents are constituent elements immediately entering into any meaningful combination (e. g. friendliness = [friend + ly] + ness). The dichotomic division of a construction begins with the larger elements and continues to ultimate constituents. The methods of Descriptive Linguistics gave rise to Transformational Grammar (T-Grammar) with its method of transformation understood as the transition from one syntactic pattern to another syntactic pattern with the preservation of the notional parts. The main problems of T-Grammar were to establish the set of kernel sentences (basic syntactic structures) and to establish the set and the order of transformation rules for deriving all the other sentences from kernel ones. R. B. Lees reduced the number of basic structures to the two: NV and N is N/A. Ch. Fries proposed the three patterns: N is N/A; NVN; NV. Z. S. Harris gave the following list of kernel sentences in the English language: 1) N V (The team went away) — the V occurs without object. 2) N V N (We’ll take it). 13 3) N V prep N (The teacher looked at him). 4) N is N (He is an architect). 5) N is A (The girl is pretty). 6) N is prep N (The paper is of importance). 7) N is D (The man is here). Two more basic structures were also introduced: 8) N V N N (The teacher gave him his pen) — for the V of the “give” type. 9) N V N D (He threw his coat on the sofa) — for the V of the “put” type. Transformational-Generative Grammar developed by N. Chomsky (“Three Models for the Description of Language”, 1956), is a more specific type of T-Grammar. It holds that some grammatical rules are transformational, i. e. they change one structure into another according to such prescribed conventions as moving, inserting, deleting, and replacing items. It stipulates two levels of syntactic structure: deep structure (an abstract underlying structure that holds all the syntactic information required for the interpretation of a given sentence) and surface structure (a structure that includes all the syntactic features of a sentence required to convert the sentence into a spoken or written version). Working bibliography Iofik L. L. Readings in the Theory of English Grammar / L. L. Iofik [et al.]. Leningrad, 1981. P. 32–39. Irteneva N. F. A Theoretical English Grammar : Syntax / N. F. Irteneva [et al.]. Moscow, 1969. P. 27– 49. 3. General Linguistic Notions Language is the system, phonological, lexical, and grammatical, which lies at the base of all speaking. Speech, on the other hand, is the manifestation of language, or its use by various speakers and writers of the given language. Text is the result of the process of speech. Language is social by nature; it grows and develops with the development of 14 society. It exists in individual minds, but serves the purposes of social intercourse through speech (originally oral, nowadays to a greater extent written). The three constituent parts of language are the phonological system, the lexical system, the grammatical system. The unity of these three elements forms a language. The system of language includes the body of material units: sounds (phonemes), morphemes, words (lexemes), word-groups, sentences, supra-phrasal unities. According to them we distinguish between 6 levels of linguistic analysis. Phoneme is a linguistic unit, but not a linguistic sign. It has no meaning; it has a meaning differential function instead. It differentiates morphemes and words as material bodies. Units of all the other levels are meaningful. They are bilateral, possessing both form and meaning. The morphemes express abstract, “significative” meanings which are used as constituents for the formation of more concrete, “nominative” meanings. Words and all the higher units: phrases (word combinations, word-groups), sentences and supra-phrasal unities (sentence-groups, textual unities, or just text) are used to express referential meanings. Three main branches of linguistics dealing with the main linguistic units are phonetics (phonology), lexicology and grammar. Grammar is the study of the grammatical structure of language. It includes morphology and syntax. Morphology is the part of grammar which treats of the forms of words. Syntax is the part of grammar which treats of phrases and sentences. The border-line between the two is conventional, and there are cases of overlapping. While free phrases fall under syntax, the formations like have been found, has been raining are referred to as analytical word-forms and fall under morphology. Set phrases make the subject of phraseology as a branch of lexicology. Morphology deals with the paradigmatic relations of morphemes and words, while syntax deals with the syntagmatic relations in phrases and sentences. Syntagmatic relations are immediate linear relations between units in a segmental sequence (string). Syntagmatically connected are words and word-groups in the sentence, morphemes within words, phonemes within morphemes and words. Syntax as a part of grammar studies syntagmatic relations of words in phrases and sentences. 15 There are four main types of notional syntagmas identified in the sentence The small lady listened to me attentively: 1) predicative syntagma — The lady listened; 2) objective syntagma — listened to me; 3) attributive syntagma — The small lady; 4) adverbial syntagma — listened attentively. Paradigmatic relations exist between elements of the system of language outside the strings where they occur. Each linguistic unit is included in a set of connections based on different properties. This is evident in classical grammatical paradigms which express various grammatical categories (e. g. number, person, case, tense, aspect, mood). Morphology is a part of grammar which deals with the paradigmatic relations of word-forms. The major English verb paradigm includes 5 forms: 1) The Base Form (work). 2) The S-Form (works). 3) The ED-Form of the Past Simple (worked). 4) The ED-Form of the Past Participle (worked). 5) The ING-Form (working). Working bibliography Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 6–17. Ilyish B. A. The Structure of Modern English / B. A. Ilyish. Leningrad, 1971. P. 12–15. Section II Morphology 4. Morphology as a Part of Grammar The course of Modern English morphology consists of three main parts: 1) essentials of morphology, 2) the system of parts of speech, 3) the study of each part of speech in terms of its grammatical categories and syntactic functions. The chief notions of morphology include the grammatical category, the word and the morpheme. Grammatical category is a system of expressing a generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms (e. g. the category of number in nouns with the singular and plural forms). Categorial grammatical meanings are the most general meanings rendered by language and expressed by systematical correlations of word-forms (e. g. tense, aspect, voice, mood in the verb system). The paradigmatic correlations of grammatical forms in a category are exposed by the grammatical oppositions of various types (e. g. a binary privative opposition found in the category of number; a gradual opposition — in the degrees of comparison of adjectives, an equipotential opposition — in the three tense system). Word is the principal and basic unit of the language system, the largest on the morphological and the smallest on the syntactic level of linguistic analysis. It is very difficult to give a complete definition to the word because the word is an extremely complex and many-sided phenomenon. Within different linguistic theories and trends the word is defined as the minimal potential sentence, the minimal free linguistic form, the elementary component of the sentence, the grammatically 17 arranged combination of sound with meaning, the uninterrupted string of morphemes, etc. Being a linguistic sign, the word is a two-facet unit possessing both form and content, i. e. sound-form and meaning. The term “word“, or “lexeme”, is an abstraction. It refers to the word taken as an invariant unity of form and meaning. When used in actual speech, words occur in different forms. The system showing a word in all its word-forms is called its paradigm (e. g. boy, boys, boy’s, boys’). Morphemes are the smallest meaningful units into which a wordform may be divided (e. g. workers = [work + er] + s). The morpheme is the smallest meaningful part of a word expressing a generalized, significative meaning. There are root-morphemes and affixational morphemes; the latter include derivational affixes (prefixes, suffixes) and inflections. Stem, or base, is the part of a word which remains unchanged throughout its paradigm. The most characteristic feature of word structure in Modern English is the phonetic identity of the stem with the root morpheme. The root-morpheme is the common part within a word-cluster and the lexical centre of the word. Root-morphemes make the subject of lexicology. Derivational morphemes are lexically dependent on the root-morphemes, which they modify. But most of them have the part-of-speech meaning, which makes them grammatically significant. Inflectional morphemes have no lexical meaning. Inflections (endings) carry only grammatical meaning (of such categories as person, number, case, tense, aspect, etc). Allomorphs, or morphs, are all the representations of the given morpheme, in other words, the morpheme phonetic variants (e. g. please, pleasant, pleasure; or else, poor, poverty). “Zero-morpheme” is the term used to show that the absence of a morpheme indicates a certain grammatical meaning (e. g. book — singular number vs. books — plural number). The problem with zeromorpheme is that this designation contradicts the general definition of the morpheme as a two-facet linguistic unit having both form and meaning. Zero-morpheme does not have any sound form. To avoid 18 this contradiction, some scholars suggest that the term should be changed and the meaningful absence of a morpheme should be termed “zero-exponent”. Modern English has several ways of expressing grammatical meaning, or several types of word-form derivation. Synthetic types of word-form derivation imply changes in the body of the word without any auxiliary words (e. g. work — works — worked ). Analytical types consist in using an auxiliary word, devoid of any lexical meaning, to express some grammatical category of another word (e. g. work — have worked). Modern English as a predominantly analytical language demonstrates comparatively few grammatical inflections, a sparing use of sound alternations to denote grammatical forms, a wide use of auxiliaries, prepositions, and word order to denote grammatical relations. Sound alternations mean a way of expressing grammatical categories which consists in changing a sound inside the root (e. g. man — men). Suppletive formation is a way of building a form of a word from an altogether different stem (e. g. go — went). Working bibliography Бархударов Л. С. Очерки по морфологии современного английского языка / Л. С. Бархударов. М., 1975. С. 22– 47. Иванова И. П. Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка / И. П. Иванова, В. В. Бурлакова, Г. Г. Почепцов. М., 1981. С. 4–14. Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 18–37. 5. Parts of Speech The words of language are divided into grammatically relevant sets, or classes. Parts of speech are grammatical (or lexico-grammatical) classes of words identified on the basis of the three criteria: the meaning common to all the words of the given class, the form with the morphological characteristics of a type of word, and the function 19 in the sentence typical of all the words of this class (e. g. the English noun has the categorical meaning of “thingness”, the changeable forms of number and case, and the functions of the subject, object and substantive predicative). The notion of “parts of speech” goes back to the times of Ancient Greece. Aristotle (384–322 B. C.) distinguished between nouns, verbs and connectives. Traditional grammars of English, following the approach which can be traced back to Latin, agreed that there were eight parts of speech in English: the noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection. Some books additionally mentioned the article. A. I. Smirnitsky and B. A .Ilyish are Russian scholars of English grammar notable, among other things, for the development of the three-criteria characterization of the parts of speech. Modern classifications, proposed by different scholars, distinguish, as a rule, between notional parts of speech, having a full nominative value, and functional parts of speech characterized by a partial nominative value. The complete lists of notional and functional words, ever mentioned in those classifications, include the following items. Notional words: Functional words: 1) nouns; 1) prepositions; 2) adjectives; 2) conjunctions; 3) verbs; 3) articles; 4) adverbs; 4) particles; 5) pronouns; 5) postpositions. 6) numerals; 7) statives; 8) modal words; 9) interjections. The main problem with the traditional classification is that some grammatical phenomena given above have intermediary features in this system. They make up a continuum, a transition zone, between the polar entities. For example, there is a very specific group of quantifiers in English (such words as many, much, little, few). They have features of pronouns, numerals, and adjectives and are referred to as “hybrids”. 20 Statives can be considered as making up a separate part of speech (according to B. A. Ilyish), or as a specific group within the class of adjectives (according to M. Y. Blokh). There are hardly any reasons for the identification of postpositions as a separate functional class because these are prepositions and adverbs in a specific lexical modifying function. The separate notional class of modal words in this system is open to criticism because they are adverbs by nature. The same refers to the functional class of particles. The grammatical status of the English article is not clear enough; in linguistic literature there are variants of its interpretation as a sort of an auxiliary word or even a detached morpheme. In general, the items of the traditional part-of-speech system demonstrate different featuring. Sometimes one or even two of the three criteria of their identification may fail. Let’s review the system in detail. Noun is characterized by the categorical meaning of “thingness”, or substance. It has the changeable forms of number and case. The substantive functions in the sentence are those of the subject, object and predicative. Adjectives are words expressing properties of objects. There are qualitative and relative adjectives. The forms of the degrees of comparison are typical of qualitative adjectives. Adjectival functions in the sentence are those of attribute and predicative. Verb is characterized by the categorial meaning of process expressed by both finite and non-finite forms. The verb has the changeable forms of the 6 categories: person, number, tense, aspect, voice and mood. The syntactic function of the finite verb is that of predicate. The non-finite forms of the verb (Infinitive, Gerund, Participle I, Participle II) perform all the other functions (subject, object, attribute, adverbial modifier, predicative). Adverbs have the categorical meaning of the secondary property, i. e. the property of process or another property. They are characterized by the forms of the degrees of comparison (for qualitative adverbs) and the functions of various adverbial modifiers. Pronouns point to the things and properties without naming them. The categorial meaning of indication (deixis) is the only common feature 21 that unites the heterogeneous groups of English personal, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, relative, conjunctive, indefinite, defining, negative, reflexive, and reciprocal pronouns. Numerals have the categorical meaning of number (cardinal and ordinal). They are invariable in English and used in the attributive and substantive functions. Statives are words of the category of state, or qualifying a-words, which express a passing state a person or thing happens to be in (e. g. aware, alive, asleep, afraid etc). Modal words express the attitude of the speaker to the situation reflected in the sentence and its parts. Here belong the words of probability (probably, perhaps, etc), of qualitative evaluation (  fortunately, unfortunately, luckily, etc) and also of affirmation and negation. Interjection, occupying a detached position in the sentence, is a signal of emotions. Preposition expresses the dependencies and interdependencies of substantive referents. Conjunction expresses connections of phenomena. Article is a determining unit of specific nature accompanying the noun in communicative collocations. The article expresses the specific limitation of the substantive function. Particle unites the functional words of specifying and limiting meaning (even, just, only, etc). Each part of speech is further subdivided into groups and subgroups in accord with various semantic, formal and functional features of constituent words. Thus, nouns are subcategorized into proper and common, animate and inanimate, countable and uncountable, concrete and abstract, etc. Verbs are subcategorized into fully predicative and partially predicative, transitive and intransitive, actional and statal, terminative and durative, etc. Adjectives are subcategorized into qualitative and relative, etc. When taking some definitions of the parts of speech, one cannot but see that they are difficult to work with. When linguists began to look closely at English grammatical structure in the 1940s and 1950s, 22 they encountered so many problems of identification and definition that the term “part of speech” soon fell out of favour, “word class” being introduced instead. Of the various alternative systems of word classes attempted by different scholars, the one proposed by Ch. C. Fries is of a particular interest. Ch. C. Fries developed the syntactico-distributional classification of words based on the study of their position in the sentence and combinability. It was done by means of substitution tests.Taperecorded spontaneous conversations comprising about 250,000 word entries provided the material. The words isolated from that corpus were tested on the three typical sentence patterns (substitution test-frames) with the marked main positions of notional words: 1 2 3 4 Frame A. The concert was good (always). 1 2 1 4 Frame B. The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly). 1 2 4 Frame C. The team went there. The notional words could fill in the marked positions of the frames without affecting their general structural meanings (“thing and its quality at a given time” for the first frame; “actor — action — thing acted upon” for the second frame; “actor — action — direction of the action” for the third frame). As a result of successive substitution tests on the given frames, 4 positional classes of notional words were identified. They corresponded to the traditional grammatical classes of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The other words (154 units) were unable to fill in the marked notional positions of the frames without destroying their structural meanings. Ch. C. Fries distributed them into 15 groups of function words representing the three main sets: 1) the specifiers of notional words (the determiners of nouns, modal verbs, functional modifiers and the intensifiers of adjectives and adverbs); 2) the interpositional elements (prepositions and conjunctions); 3) the words, referring to the sentence as a whole (question-words; inducement words: let, let’s, please, etc; attention-getting words; words of affirmation and negation; sentence introducers it, there; and some others). 23 Comparing the classification of word classes proposed by Ch. C. Fries with the traditional system of parts of speech, one cannot help noticing the similarity of the general principles of the two: the opposition of notional and functional words, the four cardinal classes of notional words and their open character, the interpretation of functional words as syntactic mediators and their representation by the list. When discussing the strong and weak points of the morphological system of parts of speech, one should remember that traditional principles of part-of-speech identification were formulated as a result of profound research conducted on the vast material of numerous languages. The recently advanced interpretation of the part-of-speech system as a continuum, as a field structure having intermediary elements and transition zones between polar entities, provides a new promising approach to the intriguing problems of morphology. Working bibliography Иванова И. П. Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка / И. П. Иванова, В. В. Бурлакова, Г. Г. Почепцов. М., 1981. С. 14–20. Прибыток И. И. Теоретическая грамматика английского языка / И. И. Прибыток. М., 2008. С. 25–30. Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 37–48. Crystal D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language / D. Crystal. Cambridge Univ. Press. 1995. P. 206–207. Ilyish B. A. The Structure of Modern English / B. A. Ilyish. Leningrad, 1971. P. 27–35. Iofik L. L. Readings in the Theory of English Grammar / L. L. Iofik [et al.]. Leningrad, 1981. P. 47–50. 6. Noun: General Characteristics The grammatical class of nouns is characterized by the categorical meaning of “thingness”, or substance. The typical syntactic functions of the noun are those of the subject, object and predicative/complement. It is generally accepted that the noun in Modern English has only two 24 grammatical categories, those of number and case, normally expressed by the -s inflection of the plural number and the -‘s inflection of the possessive case. However, the existence of case seems to be doubtful and has to be carefully analyzed further. As far as the category of gender is concerned, most scholars (both in Russia and abroad) agree that English makes very few gender distinctions, and the Modern English noun does not have the category of grammatical gender. Nevertheless, the opposite views can be found in linguistic literature. According to M. Y. Blokh the category of gender is expressed in English by the obligatory correlation of nouns with the personal pronouns of the third person: he, she, it. This category is regarded by M. Y. Blokh as being strictly oppositional, formed by two oppositions related to each other in a hierarchy: Gender + (a strong member) Person nouns substituted by he / she + Feminine Nouns substituted by she Feminine Gender − (a weak member) Non-person nouns substituted by it Neuter Gender – Masculine Nouns substituted by he Masculine Gender This interpretation, however, is open to criticism. First, the principle of binary privative opposition has not been correctly applied here. Both strong and weak members are marked. Second, a great many person nouns in English are capable of expressing both feminine and masculine 25 genders, e. g. person, parent, friend, cousin, doctor, teacher, manager, etc. Third, in the plural forms the gender distinctions are neutralized. There is another approach, typical of some British and American scholars. They identify the grammatical category of gender with a few closed groups of English nouns, e. g. kinship terms (  father — mother, son — daughter, brother — sister, husband — wife, uncle — aunt, etc). The other groups include: man — woman, boy — girl, gentleman — lady, king — queen, or, else, cock — hen, bull — cow, etc. The problem with such words is that the biological sex distinctions are expressed here on the lexical level. It is the lexical meaning of these words which is responsible for the gender differentiations; no morphological correlations can be found with them. On the other hand, there are several non-productive suffixal formations of the type: actor — actress, host — hostess, waiter — waitress, duke — duchess, prophet — prophetess, lion — lioness, etc. They are grammatically relevant and may be interesting in a diachronic study as the evidence of some former trends in the English language development. However, they are exceptional and cannot build up any grammatically significant paradigm within the Modern English noun system. The conclusion is that there is no grammatical category of gender in Modern English. Subclasses of English Nouns. Very important for current grammatical usage are semantic subdivisions of English nouns into proper and common, animate and inanimate, countable and uncountable, concrete and abstract. In particular, the use of the English articles is affected by the noun belonging to the subclass of proper names or that of common nouns; or, else, concrete or abstract nouns. Within the category of number the plural form is impossible with uncountable nouns (names of substances and abstract notions). In the case system, inanimate nouns (with some exceptions) are not allowed to have the possessive case form. Attributive Function of English Nouns. In Modern English a noun may just stand before another noun and modify it, making up with it an attributive syntagma, e. g. stone wall, speech sound, etc. Different ideas have been put forward concerning this grammatical phenomenon. The 26 view that the first element in such phrases as “stone wall” is a noun was expressed by H. Sweet and most other scholars; the view that it is an adjective or at least approaches the adjective state — by O. Jespersen. The third interpretation is that the first element is neither a noun nor an adjective, but a separate part of speech, viz. an attributive noun. The variety of opinions shows that the precise identification of the grammatical status of the element in question has run into considerable difficulties. First of all, it is difficult to apply here the criteria used to distinguish a noun from an adjective. The first element in the phrases like stone wall does not form degrees of comparison, but on the other hand, many English relative adjectives (e. g. golden, linguistic, Japanese) do not have degrees of comparison either. Most practical English grammars have chosen the interpretation that the first element in such phrases as “stone wall” is a noun in a specific syntactic function. This view appears to be the most plausible. Working bibliography Иванова И. П. Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка / И. П. Иванова, В. В. Бурлакова, Г. Г. Почепцов. М., 1981. С. 21–22. Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 48–55. Ilyish B. A. The Structure of Modern English / B. A. Ilyish. Leningrad, 1971. P. 64–65. 7. Noun: Category of Number Modern English, as many other languages, distinguishes between two numbers, singular and plural. Their categorical meaning is clear enough: the singular number shows that one object is meant, the plural shows that two or more objects are meant. Thus, the opposition is “one — more than one” (e. g. student — students, girl — girls, story — stories, etc), with the plural forms being the strong member, marked by the -s inflection in its three phonetic variants: [s], [z], [iz]. There are some closed groups of nouns which display exceptional plural forms: 27 1) Four nouns add the non-productive suffixes -en, -ren (ox — oxen, child — children, brother — brethren, aurochs — aurochsen). 2) Seven nouns change their vowel; this process is known as mutation, or sound alternation (man — men, woman — women, goose — geese, foot — feet, tooth — teeth, mouse — mice, louse — lice). The change does not take place when there is a derived sense, as when louse refers to a person ( you, louses) or mouse to a character (We’ve hired three Mickey Mouses this month). 3) A few nouns have the same form for both singular and plural, even though they are semantically variable, allowing a difference between “one” and “more than one”. Only the context enables us to know which meaning is intended (sheep — sheep, deer — deer, salmon — salmon, aircraft — aircraft, offspring — offspring, series — series, species — species). 4) Many nouns, borrowed from Latin or Greek, have kept the original plural (e. g. alga — algae, larva — larvae, bacterium — bacteria, datum — data, phenomenon — phenomena, criterion — criteria, bacillus — bacilli, locus — loci, nucleus — nuclei, stimulus — stimuli, codex — codices, analysis — analyses, basis — bases, crisis — crises, etc). There are variations of usage with some other Latin or Greek words, that is the original plural form vs Standard English one (e. g. antenna — ae/-s, formula — ae/-s, aquarium — a/-s, maximum — a/-s, medium — a/-s, referendum — a/-s, forum — a/-s, focus — i/-es, fungus — i/es, cactus — i/es, syllabus — i/es, radius — i/ es, index — ices/-es, appendix — ices/-es, apex — ices/-es, vortex — ices/-es, matrix — ices/-es, etc). Many English nouns do not show a contrast between singular and plural. They are classified into several groups. Nouns with the descriptive plural. The plural form of such a noun has a pronounced stylistic coloring due to the usage of the uncountable noun in the function of the countable noun, e. g. the waters of the Atlantic; Arabia, the land of sands; “A Daughter of the Snows” (J. London). The opposition “one — more than one” does not apply here. We could not possibly say three waters, or five snows. The real difference in meaning between water and waters, or snow and snows is that the plural form serves to denote a landscape or seascape in order to impress (a vast 28 stretch of water; the ground covered by snow, etc). A peculiar stylistic value of such forms is evident. Nouns with a fully lexicalized plural form. The plural form develops a completely new meaning which the singular does not have at all, e. g. colour — colours (флаг), custom — customs (таможня). Pluralia Tantum nouns. These are nouns which have only a plural and no singular form. Here belong the names of “two-part” items (trousers, scissors, binoculars, jeans, etc) and nouns of indefinite plurality (annals, amends, auspices, congratulations, dregs, outskirts, remains, thanks, tropics, etc). There are also a few nouns which look singular but are always plural (vermin, people, livestock, etc). Singularia Tantum nouns. These are nouns which have only a singular and no plural form. In fact, they are uncountable, because they denote material substance (air, milk, oxygen, oil, etc) or abstract notions ( peace, usefulness, music, etc). However, such nouns may become countable if they are used to denote objects made of the material (iron — irons), or special kinds of the substance (wine — wines), or objects/persons exhibiting the quality denoted by the noun (beauty — beauties). Names of subjects, diseases, and games, such as linguistics, mathematics, physics, mumps, billiards, etc are always in the singular. Collective nouns and nouns of multitude. These are nouns denoting groups of human beings (family, folk, party, government, police, etc) and also of animals (cattle, poultry) which can be used in two different ways: either they are taken to denote the group as a whole, or else they are taken to denote the group as consisting of a number of individuals (e. g. My family is small — My family are early risers). Working bibliography Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 55–60. Crystal D. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language / D. Crystal. Cambridge Univ. Press. 1995. P. 200–201. Ilyish B. A. The Structure of Modern English / B. A. Ilyish. Leningrad, 1971. P. 36–41. 29 8. Noun: Category of Case The problem of case in Modern English nouns is one of the most difficult problems in English grammar. The traditional view presented in most practical grammars is that English nouns have two cases: a common case (e. g. father) and a possessive or genitive case (e. g. father’s). However, there are some other views which can be divided into two main groups: 1) the number of cases in English is more than two; 2) there are no cases at all in Modern English nouns. The classical definition of the grammatical category of case reads: “Case is the category of a noun expressing relations between the thing denoted by the noun and other things, or properties, or actions, and manifested by some formal sign in the noun itself ”. This sign is almost always an inflection, and it may also be a zero sign i. e. the grammatically meaningful absence of any sign. It is obvious that the minimal number of case forms in a given language system is two because at least two grammatically correlated elements are needed to establish a category. Thus case is a part of the morphological system of a language. With this interpretation in view, it is hardly possible to accept the theories which hold that case may also be expressed by prepositions or by the word order. It is the position of Max Deutschbein and some other scholars that Modern English nouns have four cases, viz. nominative, genitive, dative and accusative, of which the genitive case is expressed by the -‘s inflection and by the preposition of, the dative — by the preposition to and also by the word order, and the accusative is distinguished from the dative by the word order alone. But there is a contradiction here pointed out by B. A. Ilyish. He says that once we admit prepositions, or word order, or any other non-morphological means of expressing case, the number of cases may grow indefinitely. There may be an instrumental case expressed by the preposition with, or a locative case expressed by the preposition in, or any other case. That view would mean abandoning the idea of the morphological category of case and confusing wordforms with syntactic phenomena. It seems obvious that the two-case system (the common case and the possessive case) is a reasonable choice from the morphological point of view. It should be kept in mind, however, that the possibility of 30 forming the possessive case, also referred to as s-genitive, is limited to English nouns denoting living beings (first of all, person nouns, e. g. my father’s room) and a few others (those denoting units of time, e. g. this year’s elections, and also some substantivized adverbs, e. g. yesterday’s news). It should also be noted that this limitation is not too strict and there seems to be some tendency at work to use the s-genitive more extensively (e. g. a work’s popularity, the engine’s life). The other problem with the possessive case is the possibility in Modern English of such expressions as Smith and Brown’s office, the King of England’s residence, the Oxford professor of poetry’s lecture, etc in which the -‘s refers to the whole group of words. In such collocations as somebody else’s child, nobody else’s business the word immediately preceding the -‘s inflection is an adverb which could not by itself have the possessive (genitive) case form. Formations of this kind are not rare. In Sweet’s famous example, the man I saw yesterday’s son, the -‘s inflection refers to the whole attributive clause. All these phenomena give rise to doubts about the existence of a traditional morphological case system in Modern English, in particular about the form in -‘s being a case form at all. The problem of case in Modern English has been variously interpreted by many scholars, both in this country and elsewhere. M. Y. Blokh says that four special views should be considered as essential in the analysis of this grammatical phenomenon. The first view called “the theory of positional cases” is directly connected with old grammatical tradition and can be found in the works of J. C. Nesfield, M. Deutschbein, M. Bryant and some other scholars. According to them, the English noun, on the analogy on classical Latin grammar, could distinguish, besides the inflectional genitive case, also the noninflectional, i. e. purely positional cases: nominative, vocative, dative, and accusative. The prerequisite for such an interpretation is the fact that the functional meanings rendered by cases can be expressed in language by non-morphological means, in particular, by word-order. The second view is called “the theory of prepositional cases”. It is also connected with the old school grammar teaching and was advanced as a logical supplement to the positional view of the case. In accord with 31 the prepositional theory, combinations of nouns with prepositions in certain collocations should be understood as morphological case forms. To these belong first of all the dative case (to +noun, for + noun) and the genitive case (of + noun). These prepositions, according to G. Curme, are “inflectional prepositions” equivalent to case inflections. The prepositional cases are taken, by the scholars who recognize them, as coexisting with positional cases together with the classical inflectional genitive (possessive) completing the case system of the English noun. The third view of the English noun case recognizes a limited inflectional system of two cases in English: the common case and the possessive (genitive) case. The limited case theory is most broadly accepted among linguists. It was developed by such scholars as H. Sweet, O. Jespersen. In the works of A. I. Smirnitsky and L. S. Barkhudarov it is presented as an oppositional system, the genitive form marked with the -‘s inflection being the strong member of the categorical opposition, the common, or the non-genitive form being the weak member. The limited case theory applies to the noun-forms with the -‘s inflection; the specific word-combinations of the type Smith and Brown’s office, somebody else’s daughter, etc, where the -‘s refers to the whole phrase, are not taken into consideration. The forth view of the problem of the English noun cases treats the English noun as having lost the category of case in the course of its historical development. All the noun cases, including genitive, are regarded as extinct. The only existing case inflection -‘s is described by the proponents of this approach (G. N. Vorontsova and some other scholars) as a specific postpositional element — the possessive postposition. One cannot but acknowledge the rational character of this reasoning; it is based on the careful observation of the linguistic data. For all that, however, the theory of the possessive postposition fails to take into account the inflectional nature of the -‘s. We have considered theoretical aspects of the problem of case of the English noun. As a result of the analysis, we may come to the conclusion that the inflectional case of nouns in English has practically ceased to exist. The remaining two-case system has a limited application in the expression of various case relations in Modern English. 32 The personal pronouns in English are commonly interpreted as having a case system of their own, quite different from that of nouns. The two cases traditionally recognized here are the nominative case (I, you, he, etc.) and the objective case (me, you, him, etc). Working bibliography Прибыток И. И. Теоретическая грамматика английского языка / И. И. Прибыток. М., 2008. С. 35–46. Blokh M. Y. A Course in Theoretical English Grammar / M. Y. Blokh. Moscow, 2004. P. 61–72. Ilyish B. A. The Structure of Modern English / B. A. Ilyish. Leningrad, 1971. P. 41–48. 9. Adjective It is common knowledge that adjectives are words expressing properties of objects. They are divided into qualitative and relative adjectives. But there is not much to be said about the English adjective from the morphological point of view; it has neither number, nor case, nor gender distinctions. To recognize adjectives in a text one should take into account their semantic and syntactic features. Derivative suffixes may also be helpful. Among these are the suffixes -al, -ial (national, residential), -ful (doubtful), -less (useless), -y (dusty), -like (ghostlike). They are used to derive adjectives from nouns. There are two suffixes, -ive (progressive) and -able (readable), to derive adjectives from verbal stems. On the whole, the number of adjectives which are recognized by their suffixes is insignificant as compared with the mass of English adjectives. Degrees of Comparison. The only morphological problem concerning English adjectives is the category of degrees of comparison. Most practical grammars only focus on the ways of forming degrees of comparison: 1) the synthetical pattern (with the suffixes -er, -est); 2) the analytical pattern (more + Adj.; the most + Adj.); 3) the suppletive formations (e. g. good — better — the best; bad — worse — the worst). Theoretical interpretation of degrees of comparison is not so easy. The first question which arises here is about the number of them. How many degrees of comparison does the adjective have? If we take the 33 three forms, e. g. large (positive), larger (comparative), the largest (superlative), shall we say that they are all degrees of comparison? Or shall we say that only the latter two are degrees of comparison, whereas the first does not express any idea of comparison? Both views hold. It is well known now that not every adjective has degrees of comparison. Since degrees of comparison express a difference of degree in the same property, only those of adjectives admit of degrees of comparison which denote properties capable of appearing in different degrees. For example, the adjective middle has no degrees of comparison. This refers to most relative adjectives and some qualitative, such as blind, main, perfect. Amore complex problem is the grammatical status of such formations as more difficult, the most difficult. They are referred to as the analytical forms of degrees of comparison. In that case the words more and most would be auxiliary words devoid of their lexical meaning. In fact, they preserve their meaning in the word combinations under discussion and they should be treated as components of free phrases. But, on the other hand, qualitative adjective like difficult, beautiful, interesting express properties which may be presented in different degrees and, therefore, they are bound to have degrees of comparison. B. A. Ilyish says that considerations of meaning tend towards recognizing the formations of the type more difficult as analytical forms of degrees of comparison, whereas strictly grammatical considerations lead to the contrary view. The traditional interpretation of these formations as analytical forms prevails in linguistic literature. Substantivization of Adjectives. Adjectives can, under certain circumstances, be substantivized, i. e. become nouns. This phenomenon can be found in many languages (e. g., in Russian: ученый совет — ученый). Substantivized English adjectives acquire the characteristic feature of nouns: 1) ability to form a plural; 2) ability to have a possessive case form; 3) ability to be modified by an adjective; 4) ability to have both definite and indefinite article; 5) the functions of subject and object in a sentence. If we take, for example, the word relative, we can find that it possesses all these features: my close relatives, his relative’s address, etc. 34 Such words as native, relative, representative are fully substantivized. But there are cases of a different kind: the poor, the rich, the Chinese, the English, etc. They do not form a plural in -s; they have no possessive form; they cannot be used in the singular meaning and with the indefinite article. Such adjectives are said to be partially substantivized. Working bibliography Иванова И. П. Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка / И. П. Иванова, В. В. Бурлакова, Г. Г. Почепцов. М., 1981. С. 53–63. Прибыток И. И. Теоретическая грамматика английского языка / И. И. Прибыток. М., 2008. С. 53–63. Ilyish B. A. The Structure of Modern English / B. A. Ilyish. Leningrad, 1971. P. 58–64. 10. Pronouns, Numerals, Statives The grammatical status of pronoun as a separate part of speech is difficult to define. In fact, some pronouns share essential characteristics of nouns (e. g. he), while others have much in common with adjectives (e. g. this). The only feature which unites all the pronoun forms is the meaning of indication (deixis). Pronouns point to the things and properties without