- •The subject of theoretical grammar, it’s purpose..
- •The grammatical structure of English language.
- •Morphology and syntax as two main parts of grammar.
- •Language as a system and structure. Levels
- •Systemic relations in language. Syntagmatic relations.
- •Systemic relations in language. Paradigmatic relations.
- •Linguistic units and their peculiarities.
- •The morphemic structure of the word as a language unit.
- •Lexical and grammatical aspects of the word. Types of grammatical meanings
- •Explicit grammatical categories.Implicit lexico-grammatical categories. Types and kinds of oppositions
- •The word as the smallest naming unit and the main unit of morphology.
- •Parts of speech. Different approaches to the system of parts of speech in Modem English.
- •Criteria for classification of words into parts of speech in Modem English: semantic, formal and functional. Notional and functional parts of speech
- •The Noun as a part of speech, its grammatical categories. The category of number and its peculiarities in Modem English.
- •The category of case. Different approaches to the category of case in Modem English
- •The problem of gender in English. Personal pronouns as gender indicators of nouns.
- •The Adjective as a part of speech. Problems concerning the category of degrees of comparison in Modem English.The Stative.
- •Substuntivisation of adjectives and adjectivization of nouns
- •The Verb. Finite and non-finite forms of the verb. The category of finitude
- •The Verb. The category of tense. The problem of existence of morphological future tense
- •21. The Verb.The category of aspect. Aspect opposition
- •22. The category of voice and its peculiarities in English
- •The problem of so-called Reflexive, Reciprocal and Middle voice in Modern English
- •The category of mood. The problem of mood opposition. Mood and modality
- •25. The verb. The category of person and number.
- •26. The Perfect forms in Modern English. Divergent views concerning the essence of the Perfect forms.
- •27. Syntax as a part of grammar. The main concepts of syntax.
- •28. Basic syntactic notions: syntactic units, syntactic relations, syntactic connections.
- •29. The phrase and the problem of its definition. The main distinctive features of the phrase as compared with those of the word and the sentence.
- •30. Nominal word combinations. Noun phrase with pre-posed and post-posed adjuncts.
- •31. Verbal word combinations. Types of verbal complements
- •32. Means of expressing syntactical relations between the components of subordinate phrases
- •33. The sentence and the problem of its definitions. The main essential features of the sentence. Implicit predication.
- •34. Classification of sentence acc. To the purpose of utterance and acc. To their structure. Two- member and one-member sentences.
- •35. Simple sentence. Principle, secondary and detached parts of the sent.
- •36. The utterance. Informative structure of the utterance.The theme and the rheme.
- •37. The utterance. Communicative and pragmatic types of utterances.
- •38. The composite sentence and the problem of coordination and subordination.
- •39. The criteria for classification of subordinate clauses.
- •SubjectandPredicateClauses:
- •2. Object Clauses:
- •3. Attributive Clauses
- •40. Text as a syntactic unit. Coherence, cohesion and deixis as the main features of the text.
- •41. Textual connective devices. Reiterations, collocation, endophoric relations.
- •42.Pragmatic approach to the study of language units.
- •43. Speech Act Theory. Classifications of speech acts.
- •According to their origin:
- •According to their function:
- •Classification
- •44. Indirect speech acts.
21. The Verb.The category of aspect. Aspect opposition
The general meaning of the category of aspect is the inherent mode of realization of the process. Aspect is closely connected with time semantics, showing, as A. M. Peshkovsky puts it, “the distribution of the action in time”, or the “temporal structure” of the action.
Like time, aspect can be expressed both by lexical and grammatical means. This is one more grammatical domain in which English differs dramatically from Russian: in Russian, aspect is rendered by lexical means only, through the subdivision of verbs into perfective and imperfective, делать – сделать; видеть– увидеть; etc. In Russian the aspective classification of verbs is constant and very strict; it presents one of the most typical characteristics of the grammatical system of the verb and governs its tense system formally and semantically. In English, as shown in Unit 10, the aspective meaning is manifested in the lexical subdivision of verbs into limitive and unlimitive, e.g.: to go – to come, to sit – sit down, etc. But most verbs in English migrate easily from one subclass to the other and their aspective meaning is primarily rendered by grammatical means through special variable verbal forms.
The expression of aspective semantics in English verbal forms is interconnected with the expression of temporal semantics; that is why in practical grammar they are treated not as separate tense and aspect forms but as specifictense-aspect forms, cf.: the present continuous – I am working; the past continuous – I was working; the past perfect and the past indefinite – I had done my work before he came, etc. This fusion of temporal and aspectual semantics and the blend in their formal expression have generated a lot of controversies in dealing with the category of aspect and the tense-aspect forms of the verb. The analysis of aspect has proven to be one of the most complex areas of English linguistics: the four correlated forms, the indefinite, the continuous, the perfect, and the perfect continuous, have been treated by different scholars as tense forms, as aspect forms, as forms of mixed tense-aspect status, and as neither tense nor aspect forms, but as forms of a separate grammatical category.
The category of aspect is a linguistic representation of the objective category of manner of action. It is realized through the opposition Non-Continuous (Common) :: Continuous. The realization of the category of aspect is closely connected with the lexical meaning of verbs, e.g.: He brought her some flowers. – Common aspect form brought the sentence means that the flowers actually reached her.; He was bringing her some flowers. – The continuous aspect form means that he had the flowers with him but something prevented him from giving them to her.
22. The category of voice and its peculiarities in English
The verbal category of voice shows the direction of the process as regards the participants of the situation reflected in the syntactic structure of the sentence. Voice is a very specific verbal category: first, it does not reflect the actual properties of the process denoted, but the speaker’s appraisal of it; the speaker chooses which of the participants in the situation – the agent (the subject, the doer of the action) or the patient (the object, the receiver of the action, theexperiencer) – should be presented as the subject of the syntactic construction. Second, though it is expressed through the morphological forms of the verb, voice is closely connected with the structural organization of the syntactic construction: the use of passive or active forms of the verb involves the use of the passive or active syntactic construction.
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, and 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, e.g.: The cup was broken by his daughter. Passive constructions are used when the agent is unknown or irrelevant, e.g.: He was killed during the war; The cup has been broken.
In the active syntactic construction the subject and the object both in the situation described and in the syntactic structure of the sentence coincide, cf.: His daughter broke the cup. One can say that in most cases the active and passive syntactic constructions actually depict the same situation presented differently by the speaker: in the passive construction the semantic emphasis is laid on the experience of the object, while in the active construction prominence is given to the actions of the doer; in many cases active and passive constructions are mutually transformative, cf.: His daughter broke the cup. - The cup was broken by his daughter. Besides the immediate “active” meaning as such, the active forms of verbs denote a wide range of various non-passive meanings, for example, processes which do not imply any objects at all, e.g.: The child cried; It rained; etc.