20 The second participle
The second participle, that is, forms like invited, liked, written, taken, etc., presents many peculiar difficulties for analysis.
First of all we must emphasise that we will analyse the meaning and the use of the second participle when it does not make part of an analytical verb form, whether it be the perfect (have invited, have taken), or the passive voice (was invited, was taken). When the second participle makes part of an analytical form, it loses some of its own characteristics, and indeed we may doubt whether it should still bear the name of participle in those cases.
Analysing the meaning and the functions of the second participle, we must exclude the cases where it has been adjectivised, that is, changed into an adjective, and is no longer a participle, for example, in such phrases as written work, which is used as the opposite of oral work, or devoted friend, where devoted does not designate an action, or, indeed, the result of an action, but a property.
The use of the second participle outside the analytical formations is comparatively limited. We find it either as a predicative in such cases as The door is shut, when it does not denote an action (compare, The door is shut at nine p. m. every day) but a state of things, or as an objective predicative, e. g. He found the door shut, or as an attribute following a noun, more often with some words accompanying it.
It was pointed out long ago that many intransitive verbs have no second participle that could be used outside the analytical forms of the perfect. For instance, such forms as been, laughed, run, sat, lain, wept, etc. can only appear within a perfect form and do not exist as separate participles.
On
the whole, then, with intransitive verbs the second participle does
not constitute an integral part of the verbal system at all,
a
nd
it may be left out of consideration when we analyse that system.
Things are different with transitive verbs. Here, though the use of the second participle as an attribute is limited, there can be no doubt that it exists as a separate form of the verb and not merely as a component of the analytical perfect or passive.
As to aspect, tense, and correlation, the problem appears to be this: We can, for instance, compare such phrases as the following: (1) a young man liked by everybody, (2) a young man killed in the war. It is clear at once that the action denoted by the participle liked is going on, whereas that denoted by the participle killed is finished. This certainly should not be interpreted as two different meanings of the participle as a grammatical form, since it depends on the lexical meaning of the verb (the verb like denotes an emotional attitude, which can last indefinitely, while the verb kill denotes an action which reaches its end and does not last after that). We must then say that the meaning of the form as such is not affected by these differences.
Owing to these peculiarities, the second participle occupies a unique position in the verbal system, and it is impossible to find for it a place in a table where special columns or lines are allotted to aspect, tense, and correlation.
21 THE CONJUNCTIONCompare, for instance, the two sentences, He came because it was late, and He came though it was late. The different conjunctions obviously express different real relations between two extralinguistic phenomena: his coming and its being late. The causal connection between them exists outside the language, and so does the concessive relation expressed in the latter of the two sentences.
So far our reasoning and our conclusions have been the same as in the case of prepositions. Now, however, comes a point in which conjunctions are different from prepositions. When discussing prepositions, we noted that in a certain number of cases the use of a given preposition is predicted by the preceding word: thus the verb depend can only be followed by the preposition on (or upon), the adjective characteristic only by the preposition of, etc. In such cases the preposition has no meaning of its own. Conjunctions in this respect are entirely different. The use of a conjunction is never predicted by any preceding word. We will no longer inquire into the meanings of conjunctions, as this is a question of lexicology rather than grammar.
In studying the syntactical functions of conjunctions, we have, just as with prepositions, to distinguish between two levels — that of phrases and that of sentences.
On
the phrase level it must be said that conjunctions connect words and
phrases. It is the so-called co-ordinating conjunctions that are
found here, and only very rarely subordinating ones.
O
n
the sentence level it must be said that conjunctions connect clauses.
The division of conjunctions into co-ordinating and subordinating is one that can hardly be dealt with outside syntax: co-ordinating conjunctions imply co-ordination of clauses, and subordinating conjunctions imply subordination of clauses.
Conjunctions can sometimes lose their connecting function, as is the case with the conjunction if in sentences expressing wish, like the following: If only she might play the question loud enough to reach the ears of this Paul Steitler. Probably we shall have to say that if here is no longer a conjunction but a particle.
22. Grammatical category and its characteristic features.
M.Y. Blokh defines the grammatical category as "a system of expressing a generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms". It’s a unity of form & mean-g. 1)The general notion on which a gram. category grounds is gram. mean-g. 2)The forms united into a grammatical category possess a common general meaning that gives a name to the category and each form possesses its own specific meaning that presents a specification of the general meaning and differentiates the form from the other form/forms within the category. The forms lives - lived - will live are united on the basis of the common general grammatical meaning of tense and constitute the grammatical category of tense. Within this category each form has its own specific meaning of tense: present, past and future. 3) gram. categories don’t nominate objects or units of lang., instead they express relations between lang. units. The grammatical category of tense presents a specific lingual expression of objective time, the grammatical category of case presents various relations between the action and its participants, the grammatical category of number in nouns reflects the quantitative relations between homogeneous objects of reality, the grammatical category of mood presents the relations between the action and reality as they are presented by the speaker etc. Such grammatical categories may also be called inherent (неотъемлемый, присущий). 4) Conceptual (понятийные) grammatical categories are universal, they exist in most of the languages though their volume and their scope may vary considerably in various languages. Gram. cat-s represent lang. realization of universal cat-s of human thinking. That’s why gram. cat-s typical of a particular lang. are unique. The grammatical category of number is the most universal grammatical category, all speech communities have linguistic means of encoding number, though these means differ greatly in different languages. 5) A grammatical category is constituted on the basis of contrastive grammatical forms which share a certain grammatical meaning correlated to some general concept (time, number) and differ in more concrete meanings within the scope of the same concept. Such contrastive grammatical forms are called oppositions and all grammatical categories are based on oppositions. The method of oppositional analysis was introduced by Trubetskoy . Now the method of oppositional analysis is widely used in lexicology and grammar.
23. Parts of speech and different principles of their classification.
The general definition of a part of speech: it is a lexical-grammatical word class which is characterized by a general abstract grammatical meaning, expressed in certain grammatical markers. Within a part of speech similar grammatical features are common to all words belonging to this class.
A part of speech is a mixed lexical-grammatical phenomenon, because:
1) Words are characterized by individual lexical meanings. 2) Each generalized class of words (noun/verb/adj., etc) has a unifying abstract gram. meaning, for ex.: noun – substance, verb – process, adjective – quality of substance, adverb – quality of process. 3) Some parts of speech are capable of representing gram. meaning in a set of formal exponents; for ex.: the plural of nouns is expressed with suffix –s (this feature is not universal in all languages).
PS are distinguished from one another by the number of wds in each class. The greatest number of wds is found in the noun & verb. The N&V correspond to the subj.&pred. of the sent., they’re usually the center of predication.
Modern classification of parts of speech is traced back to ancient Greek. Later this classification was applied to Latin and thus it found its way in modern languages. The present day classification of parts of speech is severely criticized, when it’s applied to languages the structure of which is different to the structure of the Latin language. So the criticism is easily justified. On the other hand the traditional division of words into parts of speech seems quiet natural and easy to understand & remember from the logical point of view. So it’s not the classification itself that is wrong but it must be the principles of classification that should be criticized and reviewed.
Classifying a lang. from the view point of PS, there are the following principles:
Semantic: the general mean-g of a PS doesn’t coincide with a lex. or gram.mean-g of every individual word, but it’s closely connected with it. Thus the gen. mean-g of a PS is neither lex. nor gram., but it’s to be called lexical-grammatical. Ex. nouns are characterized by substantivity, verbs- actions & states, which together mean processes, adj-s- attributes of substances, etc.
Morphological: it has 2 aspects: a) deals with morphol. categories (each PS possesses certain morphol. cat-s which are not found in other PS): ex. nouns- case & number , adj.- comparison, verbs- 7 categories. This aspect is more important.b) the use of form-build. affixes (deriv. affixes sometimes can be found within this or that PS only): ex. nouns- -ment, -ion, -ness. But deriv. affixes may be highly confusing: ex. –ly: friendly(adj), daily(noun), kindly(adv.), possibly (modal wd)
Syntactic: a) the role of a wd in a sent. (dif. synt. Functions are typical of dif. PS); b) the combinability of wds/ the syntactical distribution (распределение): ex. noun can combine with prepositions, articles, adj-s, other nouns, verbs.
Functional: PS- a field that has a core & a periphery.
24 The Definition of the Sentence. Its Essential Features. The Classification of Sentences.
A sentence is a unit of speech whose grammatical structure conforms to the laws of the language and which serves as the chief means of conveying a thought. A sentence is not only a means of communicating something about reality but a means of showing the speaker’s attitude to it.
It is rather difficult to define the sentence as it is connected with many lingual and extra lingual aspects – logical, psychological and philosophical. We will just stick to one of them - according to academician G.Pocheptsov, the sentence is the central syntactic construction used as the minimal communicative unit that has its primary predication, actualises a definite structural scheme and possesses definite intonation characteristics.
The most essential features of the sentence as a linguistic unit are a) its structural characteristics – subject-predicate relations (primary predication), and b) its semantic characteristics – it refers to some fact in the objective reality.
According to the purpose of the utterance we distinguish 4 kinds of sentences: Communicative types
1- The declarative sentence states a fact in the affirmative or negative form. In DS the subject precedes the predicate (pronounced with falling intonation) (!: English predicate can have only one negation).
He does not go anywhere.
2- An Imperative sentence serves to induce a person to do smth, so it expresses a command (falling tone: Come to the blackboard!), a request or invitation (rising tone: Open the door, please!).
3- The interrogative sentence asks a question. It is formed by means of inversion (unless subject is an interrogative word: Who is in the room? – no inversion).
There are several kinds of questions:
General questions requiring the answer yes or no and spoken with a rising intonation. They are formed by placing part of the predicative (auxiliary or modal verb) before the subject.
Do you like art? Can you speak English?
Astonishment: Haven’t you seen him yet?
Rhetoric questions: Can you commit a whole country to their own prisons?
Special q. beginning with an interrogative word (falling intonation)
Where do you live? (order of words is as in Gen. question)
Who lives in this room? (Who – is a subject, order of words is as that of a statement)
Alternative questions, indicating choice
Do you live in town or in the country?
Disjunctive questions requiring the answer yes or no and consisting of an affirmative statement followed by a negative question, or a negative statement followed by an affirmative question
You speak English, don’t you?
4- An exclamatory sentence expresses some kind of emotion or feeling. It often begins with the words what and how, it is always in the declarative form (no inversion) (falling intonation: What a lovely day it is! How wonderful!)
Classification of sentences
1. According to structural features: simple and composite; two-member and one- member sentences. Elliptical and one-member sentences:
e.g. Marvelous! Horrible! How very interesting!
e.g. No birds singing at the dawn (Strong resemblance to 2 member sentences).
e.g. I saw him there. Yesterday (parselation).