- •Lecture 1 grammar in the systemic conception of language
- •1. The main unit of morphology. The definition of the word.
- •2. The definition of the morpheme. The correlation between the word and the morpheme. Intermediary phenomena between the word and the morpheme.
- •3. Traditional classification of morphemes: positional and functional (semantic) criteria. Roots and affixes. Lexical (derivational, word-building) and grammatical (functional, word-changing) affixes.
- •5. Distributional analysis in morphology; contrastive/non-contrastive/complementary types of distribution. Distributional classification of morphemes
- •6. The notion of a part of speech as a lexico-grammatical class of words. Criteria for differentiating the classes of words: semantic, formal and functional.
- •Lecture 3 noun: general. Gender. Number.
- •2. Grammatically relevant subclasses of nouns. The grammatical peculiarities of different groups. Their selectional syntagmatic combinability.
- •5. The absolute singular (singularia tantum) number and the absolute plural (pluralia tantum) number. Oppositional reduction of the category for different groups of nouns.
- •Lecture 4 noun: case. Article determination
- •2. The word genitive and the phrase genitive. The semantic types of the genitive. The correlation of the noun case and the pronoun case.
- •4. The problem of establishing the lexico-grammatical status of the article
- •Lecture 5
- •Verb: general.
- •Person and number. Tense.
- •1. The verb as a notional word denoting process. Its formal and functional properties.
- •2. Grammatically relevant subclasses of the verb; notional, and functional or semi-functional verbs. Verbal valency subgroups.
- •5. The infinitive as a verbal form of mixed processual-substantive nature and the basic form of verbal paradigms. Semi-predicative infinitive constructions.
- •9. The general notion of time and lingual temporality; lexical and grammatical means of time expression. Absolutive and non-absolutive time; relative and factual time.
- •11. The problem of the auxiliary verbs “shall/will” – “should/would”: the “modal future” vs. The “pure future.
- •Extract from lecture 5
- •5. The infinitive as a verbal form of mixed processual-substantive nature and the basic form of verbal paradigms. Semi-predicative infinitive constructions.
- •11. The problem of the auxiliary verbs “shall/will” – “should/would”: the “modal future” vs. The “pure future.
- •Lecture 6
- •Verb: aspect.
- •Voice. Mood.
- •1. The categorial meaning of aspect. Lexical and grammatical means of expressing aspective meaning. Various approaches to the aspective verbal forms.
- •3. Aspective representation in verbids.
- •4. The peculiarities of voice as a category. Opposition of active and passive forms.
- •6. Homonymy of the passive constructions and the predicative use of participle II with link verbs; categorial and functional differences between them.
- •7. The complexity of the category of mood in English. The types of the oblique moods; their formal and functional features.
- •1. The phrase as a polynominative lingual unit. The correlation of the phrase with the word, and the sentence. The problem of definition of the phrase.
- •3. The classification of phrases according to part-of-speech, functional and positional criteria.
- •4. The sentence as the main communicative unit of syntax. Predication as a fundamental distinguishing feature of the sentence.
- •5. Predication as a fundamental distinguishing feature of the sentence.
- •6. The notion of actual division of the sentence
- •7. The basic communicative types of sentences. The classification of utterance types by Ch. Fries. The problem of the exclamatory sentence type.
- •8. Intermediary (mixed) communicative types of sentences.
- •9. The pragmatic communicative types of the sentence: classification of speech acts.
- •1. The notion of a predicative line. The traditional classification of notional parts (members of the sentence): principal/secondary/detached.
- •2. The notions of surface and deep structures of the sentence. “Case grammar” theory of Ch. Fillmore. “Immediate constituents’.
- •3. Verb as the predicative centre of the sentence. The notion of the “elementary” sentence.
- •5. Semantic classification of simple sentences.
- •6. Paradigmatic approach in syntax. The initial basic element of syntactic derivation. Derivational transformations. Clausalization and phrasalization.
- •7. “Lower” and “higher” predicative functions. The notion of “predicative load”.
- •9. The complex sentence as a polypredicative construction. The matrix/insert sentences. The principal/subordinate clause. Semantic types of subordinators. The zero subordinator.
- •12A. The types of semi-complex sentences.
- •12B. The types of semi-compound sentences.
1. The main unit of morphology. The definition of the word.
Morphology deals with the internal structure of words, peculiarities of their grammatical categories and their semantics while traditional syntax deals with the rules governing combination of words in sentences (and texts in modern linguistics). So, the main objectives of Morphology are:
– to study the internal structure of the word and means of word form building in relation to the abstract meanings they express;
– to study general grammatical characteristics of words which enable them to make up sentence;
– to classify words into a few basic classes.
The word is the main unit of morphology. It is difficult to arrive at a one-sentence definition of such a complex linguistic unit as the word. First of all, it is the main expressive unit of human language which ensures the thought-forming function of the language. It is also the basic nominative unit of language with the help of which the naming function of language is realized. As any linguistic sign the word is a level unit. In the structure of language it belongs to the upper stage of the morphological level. It is a unit of the sphere of ‘language’ and it exists only through its speech actualization. One of the most characteristic features of the word is its indivisibility. As any other linguistic unit the word is a bilateral entity. It unites a concept (поняття, ідея) and a sound image and thus has two planes – the content and expression planes.
In the history of linguistics, there were attempts to separate grammar (as the description of linguistic forms and structures) from semantics (the description of meanings). This is absolutely impossible, since grammatical forms and regularities are meaningful, though, the quality of grammatical meanings is different from the quality of lexical meanings. Grammatical meanings are connected with the most abstract and general parts of information, rendered by lingual units. For example, the word hands, apart from its immediate lexical meaning (the referent of the word), bears some grammatical meanings, in particular, ‘thingness’ (the categorical grammatical meaning of nouns), ‘plurality’ (more than one objects are denoted) and others.
2. The definition of the morpheme. The correlation between the word and the morpheme. Intermediary phenomena between the word and the morpheme.
As shown in the previous lecture, the morpheme is the elementary meaningful lingual unit built up from phonemes and used to make words. It has meaning, but its meaning is abstract, not concrete, or nominative. Morphemes constitute the words; they do not exist outside the words. Studying the morpheme we actually study the inner structure and functions of the word.
Stating the differences between the word and the morpheme, we have to admit that the correlation between these units is problematic. The borderlines between the morpheme and the word are by no means rigid and there is a set of intermediary units (half-words - half-morphemes), which form an area of transitions between the word and the morpheme as the polar phenomena. This includes the so-called “morpheme-like” functional, or auxiliary words, for example, auxiliary verbs and adverbs, articles, particles, prepositions and conjunctions: they are realized as isolated, separate units (their separateness is in writing) but perform various grammatical functions; in other words, they function like morphemes and are semantically dependent. Cf..: a boy, have done.
Such an approach is known in linguistics as “a field approach”: polar phenomena possessing the unambiguous (однозначний, ясний) characteristic features of the opposed units constitute “the core”, or “the center” of the field, while the intermediary phenomena combining some of the characteristics of the poles make up “the periphery” of the field; e.g.: functional words make up the periphery of the class of words since their functioning is close to the functioning of morphemes.