3. English in typological and morphological classification systems. Characteristic features of English grammar system: homonymy, poly-functionalism, conversion.

The most common morphological classification of languages was first introduced by the prominent German linguists Schleicher, Steinthal, Schlegel and Humbold. It was further developed and perfected by Edward Sapir. The morphological classification is aimed at the description of basic structural phenomena and trends in languages rather than specific languages and is based on the ratio of morphemes to words. According to this criterion, there are four ideal types, whose traces are contained in all languages to a greater or lesser degree:

1) isolating (analytical) – a high ratio of morphemes of words, tends to 1:1, little to no morphological changes in words; morphological changes tend to be dependent on the word order;

2) synthetic (fusional, agglutinative);

3) polysynthetic (phrase words and sentence words).

English reveals mostly the signs of an analytical language (although not purely, of course).

A typical feature of an English word form is its transparency, its complete divisibility, which results from the homonymy of the word-building stem and the original, minimal form. Any affix is added to this stem from outside, thus it is easily identified in the word structure. But, due to the analytical structure of the language, inflectional affixes are scarce and ambiguous: -s (falls – nouns, falls – verb), -ing (Gerund, participle I), -ed (past participle, past simple), -en (plural, past participle), -er (comparative, derivational suffix of nouns).

The arbitrary character of derivational affixes (that is, the absence of rigid dependence between an affix and a part of speech) leads to such a phenomenon as conversion. This is a means of word formation when a word enters a new part of speech without any explicit, formal sign: a house – to house, to fall – a fall, blackmail – to blackmail, to hijack – a hijack. The most widely spread type of conversion is noun – verb conversion. Smirnitsky was the Russian scholar who studied conversion.

4. Word classes. Parts of speech. Traditional and new word classes.

It is natural that all words of a given language fall into definite classes. This is naturally perceived by speakers, firstly by virtue of the different grammatical categories typical of each of these classes. Say, it is meaningless to speak of the Past Indefinite of nouns or of degrees of comparison of verbs. Thus the tradition of classifying words dates back to times immemorial.

Prescriptive grammarians used to describe the English language in terms of Latin, thus singling out 8 parts of speech: declinable (noun, adjective, pronoun, verb, participle) and non-declinable (preposition, conjunction, adverb). The number of PoS varied from author to author, because early grammarians did not distinguish between nouns and adjectives; the same time they might or might not single out articles.

Today 3 criteria (put forward by Sweet and Scherba) are used: semantic, formal (morphological), functional.

Henry Sweet (first scientific grammar of the EL) combines both the morphological and the syntactic criteria:

1) decinables:

a) noun-words (nouns, noun-pronouns, noun-numerals, infinitive, gerund);

b) adjective-words (adjective, A-pronoun, A-numeral, participle);

c) verbs;

2) indeclinables:

a) adverb;

b) preposition;

c) conjunction;

d) interjection.

Vinogradov:

1. Parts of speech: noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, adverb.

2. Particles of speech: particles, prepositions, conjunctions.

Jespersen:

distinguished nouns from pronouns.

Charles Fries introduced the notion of word-classes (instead of PoS): there are 5 ranks according to their function in a sentence. In his studies he recorded 50 hours of speech, and, isolating each word, tested it on 3 frame sentences: A) The concert was good (always); B) The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly); C) The team went there. All the words outside the 5 classes concluded from these frames make up Functional words do not fit into the mentioned examples, so they make up a special limited group of 154 units that fall into three clusters:

1) determiners of notional words (noun determiners, modal verbs, intensifiers of adjectives, etc.);

2) interpositional elements, determining the relations between notional words (prepositions, conjunctions);

3) words presenting the sentence as a whole (question words, words of affirmation and negation, inducement words, attention-getting words).

Vinogradov introduced modal words and the words of the category of state. Thus modal words and statives appeared in English (74).

All things considered, the modern linguistics (who exactly?) singles out 12 parts of speech: the noun, the adjective, the verb, the adverb, the modal words, the pronouns, the numerals, the interjections, the prepositions, the conjunctions, the article. The stative as a part of speech – a controversial point. Also some linguists single out words of affirmation and negation.