Lecture-Notes in English Theoretical Grammar
Theme 1. INTRODUCTION.
Point 1. The subject of theoretical grammar and its difference from practical grammar.
The following course of theoretical grammar serves to describe the grammatical structure of the English language as a system where all parts are interconnected. The difference between theoretical and practical grammar lies in the fact that practical grammar prescribes certain rules of usage and teaches to speak (or write) correctly whereas theoretical grammar presents facts of language, while analyzing them, and gives no prescriptions.
Unlike school grammar, theoretical grammar does not always produce a ready-made decision. In language there are a number of phenomena interpreted differently by different linguists. To a great extent, these differences are due to the fact that there exist various directions in linguistics, each having its own method of analysis and, therefore, its own approach to the matter. But sometimes these differences arise because some facts of language are difficult to analyze, and in this case the only thing to offer is a possible way to solve the problem, instead of giving a final solution. It is due to this circumstance that there are different theories of the same language phenomenon, which is not the case with practical grammar.
Point 2. The main development stages of English theoretical grammar.
English theoretical grammar has naturally been developing in the mainstream of world linguistics. Observing the fact that some languages are very similar to one another in their forms, while others are quite dissimilar, scholars still long ago expressed the idea that languages revealing formal features of similarity have a common origin. Attempts to establish groups of kindred languages were repeatedly made from the 16th century on. Among the scholars who developed the idea of language relationship and attempted to give the first schemes of their genealogical groupings we find the name of J. J. Scaliger (1540-1609).
But a consistently scientific proof and study of the actual relationship between languages became possible only when the historical comparative method of language study was created – in the first quarter of the 19th century.
The historical comparative method developed in connection with the comparative observation of languages belonging to the Indo-European family, and its appearance was stimulated by the discovery of Sanskrit.
Sir William Jones (1746-1794), a prominent British orientalist and Sanskrit student, was the first to point out in the form of rigorously grounded scientific hypothesis that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, and some other languages of India and Europe had sprung from the same source which no longer existed. He put forward this hypothesis in his famous report to the Calcutta Linguistic Society (1786), basing his views on an observation of verbal roots and certain grammatical forms in the languages compared.
The relations between the languages of the Indo-European family were studied systematically and scientifically at the beginning of the 19th century by some European scholars, such as Franz Bopp (1791-1867), Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787-1832), Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), and A. Ch. Vostokov (1781-1864). These scholars not only made comparative and historical observations of the kindred languages, but they defined the fundamental conception of linguistic ‘kinship’ (‘relationship’), and created the historical comparative method in linguistics. The rise of this method marks the appearance of linguistics as a science in the strict sense of the word.
After that the historical and comparative study of the Indo-European languages became the principal line of European linguistics for many years to come.
The historical comparative linguistics was further developed in the works of such scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries as F. Dietz (1794-1876), A. F. Pott (1802-1887), A.Schleicher (1821-1868), F.I.Buslayev (1848-1897), F. F. Fortunatov (1848-1914), F. de Saussure (1857-1913), A.Meillet(1866-1936) and other linguists.
At the beginning of the 20th century the science of linguistics went different ways and later formed into various trends or schools, each of them contributing greatly to English theoretical grammar. The process is still under way nowadays, and it is going to be considered in detail further on.
Thus, we may tentatively trace three main development stages of English theoretical grammar: first (the 16th century - the first quarter of the 19th century), second (the first quarter of the 19th century - the 1930s) and third (the 1930s - present day).
Point 3. The classical scientific grammar of the late 19th century and the first
half of the 20th century.
As it has been stated above, the main method of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century was the historical comparative method. Valuable as it was for the scientific study of languages, it had definite shortcomings and limitations.
The historical comparative method did not give any exact definition of the object of linguistics as an independent science. Logical, psychological, and sociological considerations were involved in linguistic studies to such an extent as to obscure linguistics proper.
The study of numerous languages of the world was neglected, the research being limited to the group of the Indo-European languages.
It was mainly the historical changes of phonological and morphological units that were studied; syntax hardly existed as an elaborate domain of linguistics alongside of phonology and morphology. The painstaking study of the evolution of sounds and morphemes led to an atomistic approach to language.
As a reaction to the atomistic approach to language a new theory appeared that was seeking to grasp linguistic events in their mutual interconnection and interdependence, to understand and to describe language as a system.
The first linguists to speak of language as a system or a structure of smaller systems were Beaudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) and Academician F.F.Fortunatov of Russia, and the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure.
There were three major linguistic schools that developed these new notions concerning language and linguistics as the science that studies it: the Prague School that created Functional linguistics, the Copenhagen School which created Glossematics, and the American School that created Descriptive linguistics. The Immediate Constituents Grammar was a further development of descriptive linguistics; the Transformational Grammar, the latest.
The Prague School was founded in 1929, uniting Czech and Russian linguists: Mathesius, Trnka, Nikolay Trubetskoy, Roman Jakobson, and others. The chief contribution of early Praguians to modern linguistics is the technique for determining the units of the phonological structure of languages. The basic method is the use of oppositions (contrasts) of speech sounds that change the meaning of the words in which they occur.
The Copenhagen School was founded in 1933 by Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1959) and Viggo Brondal (1887-1942). In 1939 the Prague and the Copenhagen Schools founded the journal ”Acta Linguistica” that had been for several years the international journal of Structural Linguistics. In the early 1930s the conception of the Copenhagen School was given the name of ’Glossematics’ (from Gk. ’glossa’ – language).
Point 4. The American Descriptive Linguistics of the 1940s-1950s.
Descriptive linguistics developed from the necessity of studying half-known and unknown languages of the Indian tribes. At the beginning of the 20th century these languages were rapidly dying out under the conditions of that time. The study of these languages was undertaken out of purely scientific interest.
The Indian languages had no writing and, therefore, had no history. The historical comparative method was of little use there, and the first step of work was to be keen observation and rigid registration of linguistic forms.
Frantz Boas, linguist and anthropologist (1858-1942) is usually mentioned as the predesessor of American Descriptive Linguistics. His basic ideas were later developed by Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (1887-1949). Bloomfield’s main work ”Language” was published in 1933. All linguists of the USA at one time or other felt the influence of this book. It is a complete methodology of language study, approaching the language as if it were unknown to the linguist (student). The main concepts of Bloomfield’s book are:
1. Language is a workable system of sygnals, that is linguistic forms by means of which people communicate.
2. Grammar is a meaningful arrangement of linguistic forms from morphemes to sentence.
The chief contribution of the American Descriptive School to modern linguistics is the elaboration of the techniques of linguistic analysis. The main methods are the Distributional method and the method of Immediate Constituents.
A recent development of Descriptive linguistics gave rise to a new method – the Transformational grammar. The TG was first suggested by Zellig S. Harris as a method of analyzing the ”raw meterial” (concrete utterances) and was later elaborated by Noam Chomsky as a synthetic method of ”generating” (constructing) sentences. The TG refers to syntax only and presupposes the recognition (identification) of such linguistic units as phonemes, morphemes and form-classes, the latter being stated according to the distributional and the IC-analysis or otherwise. Charles Carpenter Fries is another prominent figure of American linguistic theory. His main work ”The Structure of English” is widely known.
Theme 1. INTRODUCTION (continued).
Point 5. Problems of ’Case’ Grammar.
’Case” Grammar, or role grammar, is a method to describe the semantics of a sentence, without modal or performative elements, as a system of semantic valencies through the bonds of ’the main verb’ with the roles prompted by its meaning and performed by nominal components.
Example: the verb ’to give’ requires the roles, or cases, of the agent, the receiver and the object of giving.
He gives me a book. I am given a book by him. A book is given to me by him.
Case Grammar emerged within the frames of Transformational Grammar in the late 1960s and developed as a grammatical method of description.
There are different approaches towards Case Grammar concerning the type of the logical structure of the sentence, the arrangement of roles and their possible combinations, i.e. ’case frames’, as well as the way in which semantic ties are reflected in a sentence structure by means of formal devices.
Case Grammar has been used to describe many languages on the semantic level. The results of this research are being used in developing ’artificial intellect’ (the so-called ’frame semantics’) and in psycholinguistics.
However, Case Grammar has neither clear definitions nor criteria to identify semantic roles; their status is vague in the sentence derivation; equally vague are the extent of fulness of their arrangement and the boundaries between ’role’ elements and other elements in a sentence.
Point 6. The main conceptions of syntactic semantics (or semantic syntax) and text linguistics
The purpose and the social essence of language are to serve as means of communication. Both structure and semantics of language ultimately serve exactly this purpose. For centuries linguists have focused mainly on structural peculiarities of languages. This may be easily explained by the fact that structural differences between languages are much more evident than differences in contents; that is why the study of the latter was seen as research in concrete languages. The correctness of such an assumption is proved by the fact that of all semantic phenomena the most studied were those most ideoethnic, for example, lexical and semantic structure of words. As for syntactic semantics, which is in many aspects common for various languages, it turned out to be least studied. Meanwhile, the study of this field of language semantics is of special interest for at least two reasons. Firstly, communication is not organized by means of separate words, but by means of utterances, or sentences. Learning speech communication, fully conveyed with the help of language information, is impossible without studying sentence semantics. Secondly, studying the semantic aspect of syntactic constructions is important, besides purely linguistic tasks, for understanding the peculiarities and laws of man’s thinking activities. Language and speech are the basic source of information which is a foundation for establishing the laws, as well as the categories and forms, of human thinking. Thus, language semantics is as important and legal object of linguistic study as language forms are.
Point 7. Modern methods of grammatical analysis: the I.C. method (method of immediate constituents), the oppositional, transformational and componential methods of analysis.
(a) The IC method, introduced by American descriptivists, presents the sentence not as a linear succession of words but as a hierarchy of its ICs, as a ’structure of structures’.
Ch. Fries, who further developed the method proposed by L.Bloomfield, suggested the following diagram for the analysis of the sentence which also brings forth the mechanism of generating sentences: the largest IC of a simple sentence are the NP (noun phrase) and the VP (verb phrase), and they are further divided if their structure allows.
Layer 3 The recommending committee approved his promotion.
Layer 2
Layer 1
The deeper the layer of the phrase (the greater its number), the smaller the phrase, and the smaller its ICs. The resulting units (elements) are called ultimate constituents (on the level of syntax they are words). If the sentence is complex, the largest ICs are the sentences included into the complex construction.
The diagram may be drawn somewhat differently without changing its principle of analysis. This new diagram is called a ‘candelabra’ diagram.
The man hit the ball.
 |  |  | ||||||
 | ||||||||
 |
S
If we turn the analytical (‘candelabra’) diagram upside down we get a new diagram which is called a ‘derivation tree’, because it is fit not only to analyze sentences, but shows how a sentence is derived, or generated, from the ICs.
The IC model is a complete and exact theory but its sphere of application is limited to generating only simple sentences. It also has some demerits which make it less strong than transformational models, for instance, in case of the infinitive which is a tricky thing in English.
(b) The oppositional method of analysis was introduced by the Prague School. It is especially suitable for describing morphological categories. The most general case is that of the general system of tense-forms of the English verb. In the binary opposition ‘present::past’ the second member is characterized by specific formal features – either the suffix -ed, or a phonemic modification of the root. The past is thus a marked member of the opposition as against the present, which is unmarked.
The obvious opposition within the category of voice is that between active and passive; the passive voice is the marked member of the opposition: its characteristic is the pattern 'be+Participle II', whereas the active voice is unmarked.
(c) The transformational method of analysis was introduced by American descriptivists Z.Harris and N.Chomsky. It deals with the deep structure of the utterance which is the sphere of covert (concealed) syntactic relations, as opposed to the surface structure which is the sphere of overt relations that manifest themselves through the form of single sentences. For example: John ran. She wrote a letter.
But: 1) She made him a good wife.
2) She made him a good husband.
The surface structures of these two sentences are identical but the syntactic meanings are different, and it is only with the help of certain changes (transformations) that the covert relations are brought out:
1) She became a good wife for him.
2) He became a good husband because she made him one.
The transformational sentence model is, in fact, the extension of the linguistic notion of derivation to the syntactic level which presupposes setting off the so-called ‘basic’ or ‘kernel’ structures and their transforms, i.e. sentence-structures derived from the basic ones according to the transformational rules.
E.g. He wrote a letter. – The letter was written by him.
This analysis helps one to find out difference in meaning when no other method can give results, it appears strong enough in some structures with the infinitive in which the ICs are the same:
1) John is easy to please.
2) John is eager to please.
1) It is easy - - It is easy (for smb.) to please John
Smb. pleases John - - John is easy to please.
2) John is eager - -
John is eager to please.
John pleases smb. - -
(d) The componential analysis belongs to the sphere of traditional grammar and essentially consists of ‘parsing’, i.e. sentence-member analysis that is often based on the distributional qualities of different parts of speech, which sometimes leads to confusion.
E.g. My friend received a letter yesterday. (A+S+P+O+AM)
His task is to watch. (A+S+V(+?)
His task is to settle all matters. (A+S+V+?+A+O)
Theme 2. GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE STRUCTURE
OF MODERN ENGLISH.
Point 1. The correlation of analysis and synthesis in the structure of English.
Languages may be synthetical and analytical according to their grammatical structure.
In synthetical languages, such as, for instance, Ukrainian, the grammatical relations between words are expressed by means of inflexions: e.g. долонь руки.
In analytical languages, such as English, the grammatical relations between words are expressed by means of form-words and word order: e.g. the palm of the hand.
Analytical forms are mostly proper to verbs. An analytical verb-form consists of one or more form-words, which have no lexical meaning and only express one or more of the grammatical categories of person, number, tense, aspect, voice, mood, and one notional word, generally an infinitive or a participle: e.g. He has come. I am reading.
However, the structure of a language is never purely synthetic or purely analytical. Accordingly in the English language there are:
1. Endings (speak s, table s, brother’ s, smoke d).
2. Inner flexions (m a n – m e n, sp ea k – sp o ke).
3. The synthetic forms of the Subjunctive Mood: were, be, have, etc.
Owing to the scarcity of synthetic forms the order of words, which is fixed in English, acquires extreme importance: The fisherman caught a fish.
A deviation from the general principle of word order is possible only in special cases.
Point 2. Peculiarities of the structure of English in the field of accidence (word-building and word-changing).
Affixes, i.e. prefixes and suffixes, in the English language have a dual designation – some are used in word-building, others – in word-changing. Word-building is derivation of new words from basic forms of some part of speech. Word-changing is derivation of different forms of the same word. Word-building and word-changing have their own sets of affixes: their coincidence may only be pure accidental homonymy (cf.=confer –er in agentive nouns – writer, and –er in the comparative degree of adjectives – longer). There may be occasional cases of a word-changing suffix transformation into a word-building one: I am in a strong position to know of her doings.
English prefixes perform only word-building functions, and are not supposed to be considered in this course. As for suffixes, they are divided into word-building and word-changing ones; the latter are directly related to the grammatical structure.
Point 3. Peculiarities of the English language in the field of syntax.
English syntax is characterized by the following main features:
1) A fixed word order in the sentence;
2) A great variety of word-combinations;
3) An extensive use of substitutes which save the repetition of a word in certain conditions (one, that, do);
4) Availability of numerous form-words to express the grammatical relations between words in the sentence or within the word-combination;
5) Plentiful grammatical constructions.
Point 4. Functional and semantic connection of lexicon and grammar.
The functional criterion of word division into parts of speech presupposes revealing their syntactic properties in the sentence. For notional words, it is primarily their position-and-member characteristics, i.e. their ability to perform the function of independent members of the sentence: subject, verbal predicate, predicative, object, attribute, adverbial modifier. In defining the subclass appurtenance of words, which is the second stage of classification, an important place is occupied by finding out their combinability characteristics (cf., for example, the division of verbs into valency subclasses). This is the level of analysis where a possible contradiction between substantive and lexical, and between categorial and grammatical, semantics of the word, is settled. Thus, in its basic substantive semantics the word ‘stone’ is a noun, but in the sentence ‘Aunt Emma was stoning cherries for preserves’ the said substantive base comes forward as a productive one in the verb. However, the situational semantics of the sentence reflects the stable substantive orientation of the lexeme, retained in the causative character of its content (here, ‘to take out stones’). The categorial characteristics of such lexemes might be called ‘combined objective and processional’ one. Unlike this one, the categorial characteristics of the lexeme ‘go’ in the utterance ‘That’s a go’ will be defined as ‘combined processional and objective’. Still, the combined character of semantics on the derivational and situational, and on the sensical level, does not deprive the lexeme of its unambiguous functional and semantic characterization by class appurtenance.
Point 5. Functional and semantic (lexico-grammatical) fields.
The idea of field structure in the distribution of relevant properties of objects is applied in the notion of the part of speech: within the framework of a certain part of speech a central group of words is distinguished, which costitutes the class in strict conformity with its established features, and a peripheral group of words is set off, with the corresponding gradation of features. On the functional level, one and the same part of speech may perform different functions.
Theme 3. ACCIDENCE.
Point 1. The main notions of accidence.
Accidence is the section of grammar that studies the word form. In this study it deals with such basic notions as ‘the word’, ‘the morpheme’, ‘the morph’, ‘the allomorph’, ‘the grammatical form and category of the word’, as well as its ‘grammatical meaning’, and also ‘the paradigm’, ‘the oppositional relations and the functional relations of grammatical forms’.
Point 2. The notion of the morpheme. Types of morphemes. Morphs and
allomorphs
(a) One of the most widely used definitions of the morpheme is like this: ‘The morpheme is the smallest linear meaningful unit having a sound expression’. However, there are other definitions:
- L.Bloomfield: The morpheme is ‘a linguistic form which bears no partial resemblance to any other form’.
- B. De Courtenay: The morpheme is a generalized name for linear components of the word, i.e. the root and affixes.
- Prof. A.I.Smirnitsky: The morpheme is the smallest language unit possessing essential features of language, i.e. having both external (sound) and internal (notional) aspects.
(b) Morphemes, as it has been mentioned above, may include roots and affixes. Hence, the main types of morphemes are the root morpheme and the affix morpheme. There also exists the concept of the zero morpheme for the word-forms that have no ending but are capable of taking one in the other forms of the same category, which is not quite true for English.
As for the affix morpheme, it may include either a prefix or a suffix, or both. Since prefixes and many suffixes in English are used for word-building, they are not considered in theoretical grammar. It deals only with word-changing morphemes, sometimes called auxiliary or functional morphemes.
(c) An allomorph is a variant of a morpheme which occurs in certain environments. Thus a morpheme is a group of one or more allomorphs, or morphs.
The allomorphs of a certain morpheme may coincide absolutely in sound form, e.g. the root morpheme in ‘fresh’, ‘re fresh ment’, ‘ fresh en’, the suffixes in ‘speak er ’, ‘act or ’, the adverbial suffix in ‘great ly ’, ‘ear ly ’. However, very often allomorphs are not absolutely identical, e.g. the root morpheme in ‘c o me-c a me’, ‘m a n-m e n’, the suffixes in ‘walk ed ’, ‘dream ed ’, ‘load ed ’.
Point 3. The grammatical form of the word. Synthetical and analytical forms.
(a) The grammatical form of the word is determined by its formal features conveying some grammatical meaning. The formal feature (flexion, function word, etc.) is the ‘exponent’ of the form, or the grammatical ‘formant’, the grammatical form proper being materialized by the unification of the stem with the formant in the composition of a certain paradigmatic row. Therefore, the grammatical form unites a whole class of words, each expressing a corresponding general meaning in the framework of its own concrete meaning. (E.g. the plural form of nouns: books-dogs-cases-men-oxen-data-radii, etc.) Thus the grammatical form of the word reflects its division according to the expression of a certain grammatical meaning.
(b) Synthetic forms are those which materialize the grammatical meaning through the inner morphemic composition of the word. Analytical forms, as opposed to synthetic ones, are defined as those which materialize the grammatical meaning by combining the ‘substance’ word with the ‘function’ word.
Theme 3. ACCIDENCE (continued).
Point 4. The grammatical category.
The grammatical category is a combination of two or more grammatical forms opposed or correlated by their grammatical meaning. A certain grammatical meaning is fixed in a certain set of forms. No grammatical category can exist without permanent formal features. Any grammatical category must include as many as two contrasted forms, but their number may be greater. For instance, thre are three tense forms – Present, Past and Future, four aspect forms – Indefinite, Perfect, Continuous, Perfect Continuous, but there are only two number forms of nouns, two voices, etc.