• Obligatory
The obligatory valency is such as must necessarily be realized for the sake of the grammatical completion of the syntactic construction.
The subjective and the direct objective valencies of the verb are obligatory.
• Optional
The optional valency is such as is not necessarily realized in grammatically complete constructions: this type of valency may or may not be realized depending on the concrete information conveyed by the utterance. Most of the adverbial modifiers are optional parts of the sentence, so in terms of valency the adverbial valency of the verb is mostly optional.
Semi-notional and functional verbs are united in the set of the verbs characterized by partial nominative value. To this set of verbs refer several subdivisions of verbs:
• auxiliary verbs (Вспомогательные глаголы): to be (am/is/are/was/were/been); will (would).
• modal verbs (Модальные глаголы): can/may/ought to.
• link verbs (Глаголы связки): необходимы для образования составного именного сказуемого. К ним относятся такие глаголы как to be – быть, to become – становиться.
• semi-notional verbid introducer verbs.
All semi-functional and purely functional verbs function as markers of predication showing the connection between the nominative content of the sentence and reality.
3. Verb. Category of tense, its number
The category of number shows whether the process is associated with one doer or with more than one doer, E: He eats three times a day. The sentence indicates a single eater; the verb is in the singular despite the fact than more than one process is meant.
The category of number is a two-member opposition: singular and plural. An interesting feature of this category is the fact that it is blended with person: number and person make use of the same morpheme. As person is a feature of the present tense, number is also restricted to the present tense.
Some verbs – modals – do not distinguish number at all. Still others are only used in the plural because the meaning of ‘oneness’ is hardly compatible with their lexical:
E1: The boys crowded round him. Vs. *The boy crowded round him.
E2: The soldiers regrouped and opened fire. Vs. *The soldier regrouped and opened fire.
The analysis of the examples demonstrates the weakness of the English verb as concerns the expression of person and number and its heavy reliance on the subject: it is the subject that is generally responsible for the expression of person and number in English.
The forms of the type livest, takest, tookest stand outside the grammatical system. They are associated with the personal pronoun thou (Ты) and are only used in religious and occasionally in poetical texts. With these forms the category of number appears within the category of the 2nd person and the whole system of person and number (including the past tense) must be presented in a different shape.
Time is independent of language. Tense stands for a verb form used to
express a time relation. Time is the same to all mankind while tenses vary in different languages. Time can be expressed in language in two basic ways:
1) lexically;
2) grammatically.
The category of tense is considered to be an immanent grammatical category which means that the finite verb form always expresses time distinctions. The category of tense finds different interpretations with different scholars.
According to one view, there are only two tenses in English: past and present. Most British scholars do not recognize the existence of future. It is considered to be a combination of the modal verb and an infinitive used to refer to future actions.
In traditional linguistics grammatical time is often represented as a three-form category consisting of the “linear” past, present and future forms. The meaning of the category of tense is the relation of the action expressed by a finite verb to the moment of speaking. Present denotes coincidence, past denotes a prior action, future denotes a posterior action which follows the moment of speaking.
The future-in-the-past does not find its place in the scheme based on the linear principle since it does not show any relation to the moment of speaking, hence this system is considered to be deficient, not covering all lingual data. Those who deny the existence of simple future in English consider future-in-the-past one of the mood forms. Those who recognize the existence of simple future argue that it is used in the same situation when simple future is used, in subordinate clauses when the principal clause contains a past form. So, this form is different only in one respect – it is dependent on the syntactic structure.
According to the concept worked out by Prof. Blokh, there exist two tense categories in English.
• The first one – the category of primary time – expresses a direct retrospective evaluation of the time of the process denoted. It is based upon the opposition of past vs. present, the past tense being its strong member.
• The second one – the category of “prospective time” – is based on the opposition of “after-action” and “non-after-action”, the marked member being the future tense.
4. Verb. Category of aspect.
The category of aspect shows the manner in which the action is presented. The members of the aspect opposition are the Indefinite (Неопределенный) and the Continuous forms. The Indefinite form presents an action as a mere fact. That's why it is used to denote (означать) habitual, recurrent actions, well-known facts, succession of events, etc.
The Continuous form presents an action as a developing process. It is used to denote an action going on at a given moment or period of time.
Professor Smirnitsky was the first to prove that aspect is inherent (неотъемлемый) to the English verb and that it is expressed in a two - member opposeme: writes - is writing, the marked member of which is the Continuous aspect, the unmarked one is the common aspect.
The Continuous aspect may stress the development of the action or its temporary character:
• Are you feeling cold? You are not seeing him to advantage now.
Some of the English verbs, which usually have no aspect opposites, can be used in the Continuous form to stress one of the above meanings.
1) verbs of objective relation: belong, possess, resemble, contain;
2) link-verbs: appear, prove, seem, turn out;
3) verbs of perception: see, hear, feel, smell, believe, dislike, hate, hope, know;
4) verbs of point-action: burst, jump, drop, pick up, etc.
Besides, the Common aspect has a very broad meaning; it can express even a continuous action if it is one of many in a succession.
• E: (I worked in the garden for 2 hours, then I had a rest for an hour and after that I went for a walk).
As the main function of the common aspect is naming facts, it is used in stage directions:
• E: He covers his face. She runs to the door.
On the contrary the Continuous aspect gives an action a descriptive character or emphasis on the action itself:
• E: But I’m hoping she’ll come soon.
The Continuous form may denote emotion: (irony, disapproval).
• E: Somebody has been eating from my plate.
In general the use of aspect forms in Modern English is often connected with the lexical character of the verb: durative verbs are generally not used in the Continuous form, while terminative verbs in the continuous express a repeated action or an action which hasn’t come to an end.
• E.g. He was bringing flowers (repeated action). He was stopping and leaning over gates.
Various aspective meanings of the verb can be expressed in Modern English lexically.
• E: He used to bathe. He would gaze at the sea. She fell in love at first sight.
The category of aspect has for a long time been a problem because it has been treated with the same approach towards different languages. The category of aspect in Russian is based on a different principle, as the main meaning of the perfective aspect is the completion of the action. There is no correspondence between the meaning of the members of the aspect opposition in English and Russian.
• E: ел – съел; but he ate – he was eating.
Some foreign grammarians consider the aspect to be a semantic category some others do not recognize the existence of this category in Modern English at all (Sweet, Jespersen). Still others do not separate it from the category of tense. A V. Plotkin point out that category of aspect includes the opposition
1) perfect vs. non-perfect
2) continuous vs. non – continuous.
The existence of the aspect category in English is still a disputed matter.
5. Verb. Category of voice
The verbal category of voice shows the direction of the process which regards the participants of the situation reflected in the syntactic structure of the sentence. Voice is a very specific verbal category: it does not reflect the actual properties of the process denoted, but the speaker’s estimation of it.
The category of voice is expressed by the opposition of the passive and active forms of the verb:
• the active form of the verb is the unmarked, weak member of the opposition,
• the passive is the strong member marked by the combination of the auxiliary verb to be (or the verbs to get, to become in colloquial speech) and participle II of the notional verb.
It denotes the action received or a state experienced by the referent of the subject of the syntactic construction; in other words, the syntactic subject of the sentence denotes the patient, the receiver of the action in the situation described, while the syntactic object, if any, denotes the doer, or the agent of the action.
In comparison with Russian, the category of voice in English has a much broader representation as not only transitive but also intransitive objective verbs can be used in the passive voice.
Another peculiarity of voice distinctions of English verbs consists in the fact that active forms often convey passive meanings.
6. Verb. Category of mood
A great divergence of opinions on the question of the category of mood is caused by the fact that identical mood forms can express different meanings and different forms can express similar meanings.
The category of mood shows the relation of the nominative content of the sentence towards reality. By this category the action can be presented as real, non-real, desirable, recommended, etc
It is obvious that the opposition of the one integral form of the indicative and the one integral form of the subjunctive underlies the unity of the whole system of English moods. The formal mark of this opposition is the tense-retrospect shift in the subjunctive, the latter being the strong member of the opposition. The shift consists in the perfect aspect being opposed to the imperfect aspect, both turned into the relative substitutes for the absolutive past and present tenses of the indicative.
The study of the English mood reveals a certain correlation of its formal and semantic features. The subjunctive, the integral mood of unreality, presents the two sets of forms according to the structural division of verbal tenses into
• the present
• the past
These form-sets constitute the two corresponding functional subsystems of the subjunctive, namely:
• the spective, the mood of attitudes
• the conditional, the mood of appraising causal-conditional relations of processes
Each of these, in its turn, falls into two systemic subsets, so that at the immediately working level of presentation we have the four subjunctive form-types identified on the basis of the strict correlation between their structure and their function:
1. Pure spective (Subjunctive 1), expressing consideration, desideration, inducement.
2. Stipulative Conditional (Subjunctive 2), expressing unreal condition.
3. Consective Conditional (Subjunctive 3) which expresses unreal consequence.
4. Modal Spective (Subjunctive 4) of consideration, desideration, inducement.
The elaborated scheme clearly shows that the so-called "imperativemood" has historically coincided with Subjunctive 1.
The described system is not finished in terms of the historical development of language; on the contrary, it is in the state of making bid change.
7. Noun. General
The noun as a part of speech has the categorial meaning of "substance" or "thingness". It follows from this that the noun is the main nominative part of speech.
Functions of noun:
• The most characteristic substantive function of the noun is that of the subject in the sentence, since the referent of the subject is the person or thing immediately named.
• The function of the object in the sentence is also typical of the noun as the substance word.
• Other syntactic functions, i.e. attributive, adverbial, and even predicative, although performed by the noun
with equal ease, are not immediately characteristic of its substantive quality as such.
It should be noted that, while performing these non-substantive functions, the noun essentially differs from the other parts of speech used in similar sentence positions.
Apart from the cited sentence-part functions, the noun is characterised by some special types of combinability.
*****
In particular, typical of the noun is the prepositional combinability with another noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb.
E.g.: an entrance to the house; to turn round the comer; red in the face; far from its destination.
English nouns can also easily combine with one another by sheer contact, unmediated by any special lexemic or morphemic means. In the contact group the noun in preposition plays the role of a semantic qualifier to the noun in postposition.
E.g.: a cannon ball; a log cabin; a sports event; film festivals.
8. Noun. Category of case, gender, number
The grammatical category of number is the linguistic representation of the objective category of quantity.
1. The nouns in which the opposition of explicit discreteness/indiscreteness is expressed. The singular form may denote:
a) oneness (individual separate object) E: a cat;
b) generalization (the meaning of the whole class) E: The cat is a domestic animal;
c) indiscreteness (нерасчлененность or uncountableness) E: money, milk.
2. The nouns in which this opposition is not expressed explicitly but is revealed by syntactical and lexical correlation in the context. The plural form may denote:
a) the existence of several objects (cats);
b) the inner discreteness (внутренняя расчлененность, pluralia tantum, jeans).
There are two groups here:
A. Singularia tantum. It covers different groups of nouns: proper names,
abstract nouns, material nouns, collective nouns;
B. Pluralia tantum. It covers the names of objects consisting of several
parts (jeans), names of sciences (mathematics), names of diseases, games, etc.
3. The nouns with homogenous(однородные) number forms. The number opposition
here is not expressed formally but is revealed only lexically and syntactically in the context.
E: Look! A sheep is eating grass. Look! The sheep are eating grass.
The category of gender
In Indo-European languages the category of gender is presented with flexions. It is not based on sex distinction, but it is purely grammatical. According to some language analysts (B.Ilyish, F.Palmer, and E.Morokhovskaya), nouns have no category of gender in Modern English.
Prof. Ilyish states that not a single word in Modern English shows any peculiarities in its morphology due to its denoting male or female being. Thus, the words husband and wife do not show any difference in their forms due to peculiarities of their lexical meaning.
In other words, the category of sex should not be confused with the category of gender, because sex is an objective biological category. It correlates with gender only when sex differences of living beings are manifested in the language grammatically (e.g. tiger – tigress).
Gender distinctions in English are marked for a limited number of nouns. In present-day English there are some morphemes which present differences between masculine and feminine (waiter – waitress, widow – widower). This distinction is not grammatically universal. It is not characterized by a wide range of occurrences
and by a grammatical level of abstraction. Only a limited number of words are marked as belonging to masculine, feminine or neuter. The morpheme on which the distinction between masculine and feminine is based in English is a word-building morpheme, not form-building.
Still, other scholars (M.Blokh, John Lyons) admit the existence of the category of gender. Prof. Blokh states that the existence of the category of gender in Modern English can be proved by the correlation of nouns with personal pronouns of the third person (he, she, it). Accordingly, there are three genders in English: the neuter (non-person) gender, the masculine gender, the feminine gender.
The category of case
In present-day linguistics case is used in two senses:
1) semantic, or logic,
2) syntactic.
According to the semantic case concept, which was developed by C. J. Fillmore, verbs may stand to different relations to nouns. There are 6 cases:
1. Agentive Case (A). E: John opened the door;
2. Instrumental case (I). E: The key opened the door; John used the key to open the door;
3. Dative Case (D). E: John believed that he would win (the case of the animate being affected by the state of action identified by the verb);
4. Factitive Case (F). E: The key was damaged (the result of the action or state identified by the verb);
5. Locative Case (L). E: Chicago is windy;
6. Objective case (O). E: John stole the book.
It is a case whose main role is to indicate a relationship between constituents. To put it otherwise, its role is to indicate a construction in syntax. Thus genitive is a case which marks one noun as dependent on another, e.g. John’s car.
The conception of case as a marker of a syntactic relation or a construction can be found in:
• prescriptive,
• non-structural descriptive
• structural descriptive grammars.
Prescriptivists spoke of the nominative, the dative, the genitive, the accusative, and the ablative.
Case expresses the relation of a word to another word in the word-group or
sentence (my sister’s coat). The category of case correlates with the objective
category of possession. The case category in English is realized through the
opposition: The Common Case:: The Possessive Case (sister:: sister’s).
However, in modern linguistics the term “genitive case” is used instead of the “possessive
case” because the meanings rendered by the “`s” sign are not only those of
possession. The scope of meanings rendered by the Genitive Case is the following:
1. Possessive Genitive: Mary’s father – Mary has a father,
2. Subjective Genitive: The doctor’s arrival – The doctor has arrived,
3. Objective Genitive: The man’s release – The man was released,
4. Genitive of origin: the boy’s story – the boy told the story,
5. Descriptive Genitive: children’s books – books for children
6. Genitive of measure and partitive genitive: a mile’s distance, a day’s trip
7. Appositive genitive: the city of London.
To avoid confusion with the plural, the marker of the genitive case is represented in written form with an apostrophe. This fact makes possible disengagement of –`s form from the noun to which it properly belongs. E.g.: The man I saw yesterday’s son, where -`s is appended to the whole group (the so-called group genitive). It may even follow a word which normally does not possess such a formant, as in somebody else’s book.
There is no universal point of view as to the case system in English.
Different scholars stick to a different number of cases.
1. There are two cases. (limited case theory) The Common one and The
Genitive;
2. There are no cases at all, the form `s is optional because the same relations may be expressed by the ‘of-phrase’: the doctor’s arrival – the arrival of the doctor;
3. There are three cases: the Nominative, the Genitive, the Objective due to the existence of objective pronouns me, him, whom;
4. The theory of positional cases.
5. The theory of prepositional cases.
We adhere to the view that English does possess the category of case, which is represented by the opposition of the two forms - the genitive vs. the common. The marked member of the opposition is the genitive and the unmarked the common: both members express a relation - the genitive expresses a specific relation (the relation of possession in the wide meaning of the word) while the common case expresses a wide range of relations including the relation of possession, e.g. Kennedy’s house vs. the Kennedy house. While recognizing the existence of the genitive case, we must say that the English genitive is not a classical case. Its peculiarities are:
1) the inflection -‘s is but loosely connected with the noun (e.g. the Queen of England’s daughter; the man I met yesterday’s son);
2) genitive constructions are paralleled by corresponding prepositional constructions (e.g. Shakespeare’s works vs. the works of Shakespeare);
3) the use of the genitive is mainly limited to nouns denoting living beings;
4) the inflection -‘s is used both in the singular and in the plural (e.g. a boy’s bicycle vs. the boys’ bicycles), which is not typical of case inflexions.
9. Non-finite forms of the verb: the infinitive, the gerund, the participle
Verbids are the forms of the verb intermediary in many of their lexico-grammatical features between the verb and the non-processual parts of speech.
A nonfinite verb is a verb that does not function as the predicate verb in a clause. While some nonfinite verbs take the form of past or present participles, they are generally not inflected—that is, they don’t have mood, tense, number, aspect, gender, or person.
The opposite of a nonfinite verb is a finite verb, which does serve as a predicate verb. For example, the verbs in She walks, He sings, and I went.
Most nonfinite verbs found in English are infinitives, participles and gerunds.
Gerunds.
A gerund is an -ing verb that functions as a noun.
For example: Are you into reading? Sailing is my favorite sport.
When the same words are used as adjectives, they are participles.
Infinitives.
Infinitives are non-inflected (неизменяемый) verbs that are often preceded by to.
• They may function as adverbs:
E: I struggle to understand.
• They may function as nouns:
E: To read is good for the mind.
• They may function as adjectives:
E: I don’t have time to eat.
Participles
Participles are -ed and -ing verbs that function as adjectives.
For example:
• The sleeping cat is brown.
• The freshly picked tomatoes look delicious.
• I am going to the store.
• The kids were dropped off at school.
Nonfinite clauses
A nonfinite clause is a dependent clause whose main verb is nonfinite. It may function as a noun, adjective, or adverb:
• Your calling me was very considerate.
• The firetruck, blaring its siren, sped down the road.
• We wanted to bring you a present.
10. Language in the systemic conception
11. The plane of content, the plane of expression
Language consists of three constituent parts: phonological system, lexical system and grammatical system which are studied by particular linguistic disciplines: phonology, lexicology, grammar. Only the unity of these three elements forms a language; without any one of them there is no human language.
We can speak of two types of grammar: practical and theoretical. Practical grammar gives practical rules of the use of the linguistic structures while theoretical grammar gives an analysis of the structures in the light of general principles of linguistics and the existing schools and approaches. The aim of theoretical grammar of a language is to present a theoretical description of its grammatical system, i.e. to scientifically analyse and define its grammatical categories and study the mechanisms of grammatical formation of utterances out of words in the process of speech making.
The nature of grammar is better understood in the light of discriminating the two planes of language — the plane of content and the plane of expression.
The plane of content comprises the purely semantic elements contained in language, while the plane of expression comprises the material (formal) units of language taken by themselves, apart from the meanings rendered by them.
The two planes are inseparably connected, so that no meaning can be realised without some material means of expression. Grammatical elements of language present a unity of content and expression (or, in somewhat more familiar terms, a unity of form and meaning).
The correspondence between the planes of content and expression is very complex, and it is peculiar to each language. This complexity is clearly illustrated by the phenomena of polysemy, homonymy, and synonymy.
In case of polysemy (good) & homonymy (bear as an animal/bear as a verbto withstand) two or more units of plane of content correspond to one unit of plane of expression. In case of synonymy two or more plane of expression correlate to one plane of content
12. The classification of morphemes
There are two levels of approach to the study of word- structure: the level of morphemic analysis and the level of derivational or word-formation analysis. Word is the principal and basic unit of the language system, the largest on the morphologic and the smallest on the syntactic plane of linguistic analysis. Like a word a morpheme is a lexical unit. Like a word it has a certain sound-form. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may consist of single morpheme.
In traditional grammar, the study of the morphemic structure of the word was conducted in the light of the two basic criteria:
· Positional (the location of the marginal morphemes in relation to the central ones);
· Sematic or functional (the correlative contribution of the morphemes to the general meaning of the word)
The combination of these two criteria in an integral description has led to rational classification of morphemes.
In accord with the traditional classification morphemes, Semantically morphemes fall into two classes:
· Roots (root-morphemes)
The roots express the exact "material" part of the meaning of the word, the specifications being of lexico-semantic and grammatico-semantic character. The roots of notional words are classical lexical morphemes.
· Affixes (affixal morphemes)
The affixes include: prefixes, suffixes, inflexions (grammatical suffix). Of these, pre-fixes and lexical suffixes have word-building functions, together with the root they form the stem of the word; inflexions (grammatical suffixes express different morphological categories).
According to self-dependence (по степени самостоятельности) or structurally morphemes are divided into three types:
· free (lexical), can build up words by themselves,
E: can be used "freely".
· bound (inflexional and derivational), A bound morpheme occurs only as a constituent part of a word. Affixes are, naturally, bound morphemes, for they always make part of a word,
E: the suffixes -ness, -ship, -ize, etc., the prefixes un-, dis-, de-, etc. (e.g. readiness, comradeship, to activize; unnatural, to displease, to decipher).
· semi-bound (word-morphemes), which look like words (be, have, shall, will, should, would), but function as inflexions. morphemes are morphemes that can function in a morphemic sequence both as an affix and as a free morpheme.
E: the morpheme well and half on the one hand occur as free morphemes that coincide with the stem and the word-form in utterances like sleep well, half an hour, on the other hand they occur as bound morphemes in words like well-known, half-eaten, half-done.
On the basis of formal presentation morphemes are distinguished:
1. Overt - are genuine, explicit morphemes building up words;
2. Covert - are implicit morphemes, i.d. a morpheme having no explicit representation in the actual expression (a contrastive absence of morpheme expressing a certain function).
The notion of covert morpheme coincides with the notion of zero morpheme. Example:
· birds – two morphemes, both overt: one lexical (root) and one grammatical expressing the plural.
· bird – two morphemes, the overt root and the covert grammatical suffix (окончание) of the singular.
On the basis of segmental relation are distinguished
1. Segmental - are roots, affixes.
2. Supra-segmental - are intonation contours, accents, pauses.
Interpreted as supra-segmental morphemes in distributional terms are intonation contours (интонационное ударение), accents, pauses. But, on the other hand, these units are functionally connected not with morphemes, but with larger elements of language; words, word groups, sentences.
On the basis of grammatical alternation, there are:
1. Additive - Adding an affix changes the tense or creates a positive or negative impression, and the word sound may change. Example: heated or illegal
2. Replacive - The root phonemes of grammatical interchange are considered as replacive morphemes, since they replace one another in the paradigmatic forms. Example: sing – sang – sung, man – men
On the basis of linear characteristic, there are:
1. Continuous (linear morphemes) - are an uninterrupted string of phonemes building up a morpheme.
2. Discontinuous - Are a grammatical unit built up of an interrupted string of phonemes. It is seen in the analytical grammatical form comprising an auxiliary word and a grammatical suffix.
Example:
· be... ing — for the continuous verb forms (e.g. is going);
· have... en — for the perfect verb forms (e.g. has gone);
· be... en — for the passive verb forms (e.g. is taken)