- •Morphology and syntax as parts of grammar. Grammatical units.
- •Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations of words
- •Main grammatical notions.
- •Method of opposition. Types of oppositional reduction.
- •Structure of words. Types of morphemes.
- •Means of form-building in English.
- •Parts of speech. Principles of classification.
- •H.Sweet’s classification of words into parts of speech.
- •Notional and functional classes of words.
- •General characteristics of the noun as a part of speech.
- •Ch.Frie’s syntactico-distributional classification of words.
- •The number category of the noun.
- •The theory of positional cases.
- •16.The theory of the possessive postposition.
- •17. Semantic subtypes of the genetive case.
- •18.The noun. Gender
- •19.The article. General Characteristics.
- •20. Different approaches to the number and meaning of the article.
- •21. General characteristics of the verb as a part of speech.
- •22. Categories expression time in English.
- •23. The aspect cateory. Different views on the number and kinds of aspects in Enlish.
- •24. The voice category. General characteristics.
- •25. Different views on the number and kinds of voices in English.
- •26. Peculiarities of passive constructions in English.
- •28. Means of expressing modality in English.
- •29. The cateory of mood. The Imperetive mood.
- •30. The Subjunctive mood.
- •31. Verbals. The Infinitive
- •32. The Participle.
- •33. The Gerund.
- •34. General characteristics of the adjective as a part of speech.
- •35. The degree category of the adjective.
- •36. The adverb. General characteristics.
- •37. The degree category of the adverb.
- •38.The Adlink. General characteristics.
- •39. The preposition.
- •40. The conjunction.
- •41. The phrase. General characteristics.
- •42. Principles of classification of phrases and types of relations between its constituents.
- •43. Ways of expressing syntactical relations between components of a phrase.
- •44. The sentence as a main unit of syntax.
- •45. Predicativity. Predication.
- •48. Syntactic categories. Sentence paradigm.
38.The Adlink. General characteristics.
In Modern English there exists a certain class of words such as asleep, alive, afloat, which is characterized by:
1. The lexico-grammatical meaning of 'state'. The productive prefix a-: swim,— aswim, shiver — ashiver, etc.
Peculiar combinability: the words of this class are associated almost exclusively with link-verbs: to be alive, to fall asleep, being adrift, etc.
The main syntactical function of a predicative complement.
Those grammarians who do not recognize adlinks as a separate part of speech usually consider them as a subclass of adjectives ' Let us compare adjectives and adlinks on the basis of the criteria we use to distinguish parts of speech.
1. The lexico-grammatical meanings of adjectives and adlinks are different. The former denote 'qualities', the latter 'states'.
The stem-building elements of the two parts of speech are quite different. The characteristic prefix of adlinks is a-.Adjectives have other affixes: -ful, -less, -ive, -ous, un-, pre-,etc.
Adjectives possess the category of the degrees of comparison. Adlinks have no grammatical categories. Cf. sleepy sleepier — (the) sleepiest and asleep.
The combinability of adjectives and adlinks differs greatly.
The most typical combinative model of adjectives is its right-hand connection with nouns (an ardent lover). Besides this negative combinability adlinks are characterized by several models of positive connection. The most typical of them is the left-hand connection with link-verbs: He had been ashamed and afraid.
The syntactical functions of adjectives and adlinks do not coincide. Adjectives are mainly employed as attributes, and adlinks as predicative complements. Adlinks form connections not only with finite link-verbs, parts of predications, but with link-verbs as well, employed in various functions.
Summing up, we can say that adjectives and adlinks are different classes of words, i. e. that adlinks form a separate part of speech.
39. The preposition.
The preposition is a part of speech characterized by the following features:
1. its lexico-grammatical meaning of 'relations (of substances)'.
2. Its bilateral combinability with a right-hand noun (or noun-equivalent) and a left-hand word belonging to almost any part of speech. 3. Its function of a linking word.
Prepositions are not characterized by any grammatical categories or typical stem-building elements.
As far as their structure is concerned prepositions, like other parts of speech, fall into the following groups:
Simple, e. g. at, in, of, by, with, for, etc.
Derivative, e. g. below, beside, along, etc.
Compound, e. g. inside, within, into, throughout, etc.
Composite, e. g. instead of, in accordance with, owing to, in front of, etc.
Many prepositions are homonymous with adverbs (about, before, below, down, since, etc.), conjunctions (before, since, etc.), participles (regarding, concerning, etc.), lexico-grammatical word-morphemes (in, on, up, etc.).
As elsewhere the lexico-grammatical meaning of prepositions is an abstraction from their individual lexical meanings. It is necessary to make some remarks in connection with the classification of prepositions according to their meaning into those of place, direction, time, etc.
Prepositions, like in, at, on, by, etc, which are used with all kinds of nouns, so that the local, temporal, etc. meanings of the prepositional construction do not depend on the preposition, but on the noun, may be called general prepositions. There are some other prepositions which might be called special.
The combinability of the preposition is rather peculiar. We may speak of stable right-hand connections and variable left-hand connections.