Characteristic features of the Grammatical Category
1) GC is based on the opposition of 2 or more form classes (are members of opposition). The opposite members are opposed to each other in form and in meaning. But these 2 things always should be present. When we look at the difference in form we point out the marked or the strong member of the opposition and unmarked or the weak member of the opposition. The marked member has the certain marker, which is a form-building signal. The unmarked member has no marker or zero morpheme. When we point out the marked member of the opposition we point out the difference in form. The next thing to do is to point out the difference in meaning: Grammatical meaning of the marked member is described first, because it's easier to define. Unmarked is difficult, in this case it's defined negatively. We say that the unmarked member doesn't express the meaning of the marked member.
2) Within one and the same GC the members of the opposition are mutually excluding. It means that a form of one form-class can't express the meaning of the opposite form-class = 2 opposite grammatical meanings of the same category can't be expressed, can't coexist in one form. Ex: sheep (Sg) - sheep (PI) => 2 different forms (homonyms), we understand meaning from the context, according to verb. Бархударов used this feature to prove that the Future Tense doesn’t exist. He analyzed the form of the Future-in-the Past, which expresses both a future and a past action. If these actions are expressed in one form that proves that Future-in-the Past don't belong to the category of tense. Смирницкий used it to prove that the Perfect belongs neither to the category of tense nor aspect. For that purpose he analyzed the form of the Perfect Continuous.
3) Within different GCs a word form can be opposed to a number of word-forms within diff grammatical categories.
has
done (time correlation )
(I) did(person)
is done (voice)
(they) did (number)
is doing (aspect)
did
(tense)
would do (mood)
to
do (Finitude)
Chapter 3. Morphemic structure of the word.
In accord with the allo-emic theory lingual units may be described by means of 2 types of term allo-terms and eme-terms. Eme-terms denotes the generalized invariant: phonemes, morphemes. Allo-terms are concrete manifestations of variants: allo-forms, allomorphes.
A set of allo-units is one eme-unit. The allo-emic identification of lingual elements is achieved by means of distributional analysis. The aim of this analysis is to fix and study the language unit in relation to the textual environment. The environment of the unit may be right or left. E.x. un-pardon-able (left environment of the root)
The left environment of the root is the negative prefix –un, the right environment of the root is the qualitative suffix –able. Respectively, the root –pardon- is the right environment for the prefix, and the left environment for the suffix.
The analysis is conducted in 2 stages:
The analyzed text is divided into segments consisting of phonemes. They are called morphs
We establish the environment of the morphs and define the type distribution.
There are 3 main types of distribution:
contrastive (the environment of the morphs are the same, but meaning are different)
non-contrastive (if their meaning is the same suffix; ex.ed-t: learned-learnt)
complementary (concerns different environments of different morphs, but their meaning ex: dogs-oxen)