9. Ch.Frie’s syntactico-distributional classification of words.

The distributional criterion is used by the American scholar Ch. Fries. Each class of words is characterized by a set of positions in the sentence, which are defined by substitution testing. As a result of distributional analysis Ch. Fries singles out four main classes of words, roughly corresponding to nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs.

As Ch. Fries indicates, any words, taking the position before the words of class 2, belong to class 1. Thus, the words man, he, the others, another are referred to class 1, because they can take the position before the word of class 2 (was, remembered, went).

Besides 4 classes, Ch. Fries distinguishes 15 groups. Here he again resorts to the positional principle and these groups include words of various types. For example, group A contains all words which can take the position of the: the, no, your, their, both, few, much, John’s, four, twenty, etc. There are groups including one or two words (group C – not; group H – there, there is, group N – please).

Morphological properties, as you see, are completely neglected, but syntactical functions are not taken into account either: because modal verbs are separated from class 2 (notional verbs), but modal verbs of group B also perform the predicative function like notional verbs.

Thus, CH. Fries’s classification does not achieve its aim. His division turns out to be very confusing, classes and groups overlap one another and one and the same word seems to belong to different subdivisions. But at the same time, his material gives interesting data concerning the distribution of words, their syntactical valency and the relative frequency of classes and groups. Groups containing mainly function words possess high frequency.

10. Notional and functional classes of words.

According to traditional and syntactico-distributional classification divided parts of speech into notional and functional. Notional parts of speech are open classes – new items can be added to them, they are indefinitely extendable. Functional parts of speech are closed system including a limited number of members.

The main notional parts of speech are:nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives. They are interconnected by derivational connections(strength-strengthen).

Functional parts of speech are: prepositions, conjunctions, articles, particles. The distinctive features of functional parts of speech are: 1) very general and weak lexical meaning, 2) obligatory combinability, 3) the function of linking and specifying words.

Pronouns constitute a class of words which takes an intermediary position between notional and functional words. A word in English is very often not marked morphologically and it is easy for words to pass from one class to another(round as a noun, adj, verb). Such words are treated either as lex-gr. homonyms( or as words belonging to one class).

11. General characteristics of the noun as a part of speech.

The noun is a notional part of speech characterized by the following features:

1.The lexico-grammatical meaning of substance.

2.Form. Nouns have the category of number(s. and pl.) and case (common and genitive)

3.Function. Combing with words to form phrases. A noun has left-hand connections with articles, prep., adj.,possessive pronouns, other nouns.

4.The function of subject or the predicative, an object, an attribute and adv.modifier.

5.Typical stem-building morphemes: -ist,-er,-ship.-ment, etc.

From the gr.point of view the most important is the division of nouns into countables and uncountables with regard to the category of number and into declinables and in declinables with the regard to the cat. of case. As with any other part of speech, the noun is further subdivided into subclasses in accord. with various semantical and form features. 1) on the basis of type nomination- proper nouns and common nouns.

2) form of existence –animate and inanimate. 3) abstract and concrete. 4) collective nouns. 5)class nouns. 6) material nouns. Nouns denote things and objects proper(tree), abstract(love), various qualitie(bitterness), actions (movement).

12. Different approaches to N+N structures.

Combinations like ‘my neighboúr’s dog’ ‘the dog of my neighbour’ show that a noun in the common case may be preceded by another noun in the possessive case and may be followed by a noun with a preposition. Cannon ball, speech sound, stone wall – whether they are compound words or word-combinations.

There are different approaches:

Sweet, Jesperson, Ilyish- the 1^st components of these units are nouns functionally resembling adjectives.

Smirnitsky and Akhmanova- these units are unstable compounds easily developing into word-combinations. The 1^st components are not nouns since: -they are not used in plural; - n are used as attributes only in the possessive case or with a preposition.

Khaimovitch and R. state that: - the 1^st components of such units occur in the plural (a trousers pocket); - the 1^st comp. may have left-hand connections with adj.( film exchange – new film exchange). So they say: 1) The 1^st components in formation like ‘stone wall’are nouns, not noun-stems. 2) these formations are noun word-combinations with noun adjuncts.