Language is a means of understanding ourselves and our society. The problem is how the language is constructed. The central role in the authorizing any language is played by grammar. It is a framework, a “skeleton” of it. Theses why defining the main goal of the subject one can say that it is a system analysis. Its necessary to study grammar: 1) it plays a central role in the structure of language; 2) grammar can be used to demonstrate the enormous creative power of language. ) Learning grammar contributes to identifying similarity and difference of languages. 4) for foreign language learners. The meaning of grammar. In the history of linguistics grammar had various meanings. Ata very start grammar was understood as an art of reading and spelling letters. The American linguist NOAA Chomsky writes that a grammar is “a device for producing the sentences” (1957, 11). But traditionally there are two quite distinct applications of the term “grammar”, yielding a specific sense and a general sense.
The specific sense is more traditional, when grammar is presented as just one branch of language structure, distinct from phonology and semantics language structure phonology semantics grammar The general sense of the term, popularized by Chomsky, includes all aspects of sentence patterning, including phonology, semantics and syntax. So we see that sync tax David Crystal distinguishes six types of grammar, though it’s necessary to say that all of them fall into presciently and scientific. ) Traditional grammar The tradition is over 2000 years old, and includes the works of classical Greek and Roman grammarians, Renaissance writers and 18th century prescriptive grammarians. 2) Descriptive grammar An approach that describes the grammatical constructions that are used in a language without making any evaluative judgments about their standing in society. These grammars are commonplace in linguistics, where it is standard practice to investigate a “corpus” of spoken or written trial. 3) Prescriptive grammar lays down rules governing the socially correct use of language.
These grammars were popular in Europe and America in 18th and 19th century. 4) Reference grammar/Explanatory’ grammar. A grammatical description that tries to be as comprehensive as possible. The bestows description is one compiled by the Danish grammarian Otto Jeepers. 5) pedagogical grammar For teaching a foreign language and for developing an awareness of the mother tongue there were specifically designed “teaching books” or “teaching grammars” 6) Speaking about scientific approach to language study it’s important to ark theoretical grammar. This approach goes beyond the study of individual languages.
It can be applied in the investigation of any human language and of linguistic universals. The problem of linguistic universals is very curious/inquisitive and important as it focuses our attention on similarity and difference Of languages, explains the nature Of linguistic diversity. Questions for generative grammar, case transformational grammar, functional grammar, communicative grammar, cognitive grammar, tactics, stratification’s grammar, dependency grammar, network grammar, realistic grammar. Lecture 2 General operative units of grammar Grammar is a complex of structural units (morphological and syntactical).
Morphology is understood as a part of grammar that studies the forms of words. Grammarians always used another term, accidence Cobalt). But accidence deals mainly with the inflectional or inflected workrooms, while morphology as a more general term means also the study of those elements of language which are used to extend or limit the meaning of a word, or to define its relation to other parts of a sentence. The definition of the ‘Word” as a morphological unit is troublesome until now. Thus, Masses defines a word as “minimal unit of language assessing the positional independence”.
This definition emphasizes, on the one hand, that a word is the smallest discrete unit, and, on the other, that it can take different positions in the sentence. I. P. Ivan specifies the word as a smallest meaningful unit of language and a biggest unit of morphology. For Juryman’s the word is the shortest unit of language independent in its meaning and form. So on the whole there are about 300 definitions of ‘Word” and all can be reduced to the following understanding: a word is a generalized representative of all workrooms (chloroforms, forms) in which it can be reformed (what is especially correct for flexible languages).
So understanding of the term “word” is relevant only within a system of workrooms, I. E. Pragmatically and we can’t avoid speaking of such a constituent of a word as a morpheme. As for morphemes they are linguistic signs of a very special nature. The study of morphemes presupposes the study of their occurrence, order, arrangement, commutability, mutual similarity, or dissimilarity in a systemic way. Morpheme, being the ultimate unit of the semantic level of language, can’t be divided without breaking the wholeness of a word.
There are sits anguished 1) prefixed, suffixes and root morphemes: usual – unusual; careless – careful; admit – admittance, admission; 2) The lexical lexical and grammatical morphemes. Morphemes are units which are semis and morphemic, I. E. They have their own individual meaning and don’t admit morphological variation: readable, thinkable, eatable; here (able) partial phonetician’s resemblance of morphemes (able) stands out.
A grammatical morpheme has no partial phonetician’s resemblance to any other form, being recurrent and intrinsically structural: dog -?? dogs idea – ideas bush – bushes Liz]. Zero in singular is opposed to a number of positional variants – lymphomas [z] [zero] But each lymphoma conveys the same meaning of plurality. The meaning of plurality is understood not individually but only within a system of workrooms, Pragmatically (vertical) paradigm. sync tag. Derivation morphemes are called wrongdoing and morphological (inflectional) – hardworking or forbidding.
So, a morpheme is: 1) the smallest unit of the expression plane which can be correlated with any part of the content system; 2) a recurrent meaningful form which cannot be analyzed into smaller recurrent meaningful forms; ) a morpheme is syntactically and appositionally bound, it cannot take any arbitrary position; 4) a morpheme is a unilateral unit, it never expresses both a lexical and grammatical meaning – lexical is concrete and material, grammatical IS general and abstract. The expression of grammatical meaning is subservient (Angola,beehive) to the lexical one .
Grammatical meaning is recurrent and systemic (forming part of a system), lexical meaning is free, independent and individualized. 5) A morpheme is of historical nature. And now when we know all the criteria of a morpheme, we can discuss the status of a notoriously known romper’s: 1) a morpheme should be material, but chromospheres has no sound expression. At the same time we can’t deny the fact that the absence of the ending in a wormwood is sure meaningful. That’s why U. S. Masses offers instead the term “chromospheres” the term “correspondent” which indicates that the absence of an ending bears grammatical meaning.
More than that, the existence of chromospheres meets the requirements of binary principle in linguistics and makes rather effective symmetry in description of a The problem of binary The widely spread methods used in modern linguistics are based on he theory of binary analysis and isomorphism. The theory of binary was proposed by Prague structural linguistic circle/society, and main notion transmitted by its representatives/members from phonology was the notion of opposition ( and binary opposition in particular).
That was right for phonology, but morphology being of a higher level, more complicated , presupposes the presence of two and more members of category. That is why in case of three lateral categories the term of opposition becomes vague . In morphology in three lateral categories this term means not the opposition but coordination. Marked and unmarked members of opposition) In Russian science/Animistic some scholars keep to the theory of binary (A. L. Similarity, L S. Abracadabra, B. A. Lily’s), some strictly deny it (J. S. Sour), and some use it but not in its pure state (A.
B. Boundary, G. B. Diamond, Servant). The theory of isomorphism of three levels – phonological, morphological and syntactical supposed the same types of units and relations between them at all three levels, and according to the principle of isomorphism the relations of a lower level are mechanically transmitted to the higher one. Lecture 3 Grammatical meaning and grammatical categories Grammatical meaning (GM) is a very abstract, generalized meaning deduced on the basis off large group of words and expressed by definite grammatical forms.
The difference between lexical and grammatical meaning is indefinitely expressed: lexical meaning unlike GM expresses singular objects, while the grammatical one expresses typological ideas, differences, similarity. GM is a meaning of relations. Typology of GM and GO GO is a unity of grammatical meaning and grammatical form. More definitely speaking GO is a unity of two and more grammatical forms, opposed to each other and united on the basis of a common grammatical meaning. So we can state that there are no categories having only one form. So, the notions of GM and GO are interconnected and interdependent.
And even Leonard Bloomfield explained the word category through the word meaning. Typologically we can define different types of GO (GM): 1) GO of a smaller or wider coverage. GO of smaller covertness’s smaller groups of words, e. G. The category of person ( he speaks ); GO of wider coverage covers bigger groups, e. G. The category of tense ( speaks – spoke – will speak 2) Overt (category of number) and covert (category of inanimateness, accountability) ) Dependent and independent Dependent categories unlike independent have not any forms of expression of their own (category of aspect is expressed on the basis of categorical forms of tense).
Ways ‘means of expressing grammatical meaning GM receives different expression in various languages and the type of its expression finally determines the structural type of a language. But it is not correct to speak of any pure type as every language is represented by a mixture of ways of expressing GM. We can state the preferable pattern only. There are distinguished 4 types of expressing grammatical meaning: synthetic (flexing), when the GM is expressed within the word itself. Flexing is the hardworking attribute.
Flexing may be outer – suffix ( streets, looked ), inner – changing of vowels foot – feet inflexion ‘s ( my mother and fathers room ) -it is rather syntactic than morphological; supportive: to be – am, good – better etc analytical – they appeared later than flexing. They include not less than one functional word and one notional word (is coming has been asked). There is another notion of analytical word. Workstation’s of the type “put on”, “take hold” are formally discrete but making up single semantic unit. Such understanding is based on semantic criteria, but one of properties of the word is its indivisibility, integrity.
And we can easily insert a word between the members, parts of such a workstations. So within grammatical morphology there are no analytical words but analytical forms of the words. Agglutinative – words are built up out of a long sequence of units, with each unit expressing a particular grammatical meaning, in a clear monotone way. For example, to express mom/ammo there should be 5 units to express person, number, tense, voice, mood. The enumerated types of expressing grammatical meaning underlie the typological classification of languages. There are accordingly recognized/ distinguished synthetic, analytic, agglutinative languages.