- •Theoretical Grammar of English
- •1. The subject matter of Theoretical Grammar
- •2. Descriptive and Prescriptive Grammar
- •Descriptive Grammar
- •Prescriptive Grammar
- •3. Morphology and Syntax
- •4. Content (notion) words and function Words
- •5. Morphemes: The Minimal Units of Meaning
- •7. Grammatical morphemes.
- •6. Bound and free Morphemes
- •9. Grammatical meanings
- •8. Three main types of distribution of morphemes
- •10. Categorial grammatical meaning. Grammatical category. Paradigm.
- •11. Grammatical oppositions.
- •12. Synthetical and analytical grammatical forms.
- •13. Parts of Speech (a General Overview)
- •2. The form of a word (the morphological characteristics) and
- •3. The function of a word (the syntactic characteristics).
- •14. The Noun
- •15. The Article
- •16. The Adjective
- •17. The Pronoun
- •18. The Verb - a general overview
- •19. The Adverb. General
- •20. Types of syntagmatic groupings of words.
- •21. Phrase.
- •22. Sentence.
- •23. Actual Division of the Sentence.
- •Language means of expressing the theme and the rheme.
- •24. Classifications of Sentences
- •2. Classification of Sentences according to Structure
- •25. Simple and Composite sentences – a general overview
- •26. The Principal and secondary parts of the sentence
- •27. Text as an Object of Linguistic Research.
- •28. Textual Categories.
- •29. Textual Units. Supra-Phrasal Unity and Paragraph.
26. The Principal and secondary parts of the sentence
1.The Principal parts of the sentence
There are two generally recognized main or principal parts of the sentence – the subject and the predicate. They are called so because they constitute the backbone of the sentence: without them the sentence would not exist at all, whereas all other parts may or may not be there.
The subject. The subject can be expressed by a single word or a group of words. The subject may be: a noun (The sun is rising), a pronoun (He is writing), an infinitive or gerund (To read good books improves the mind. Reading good books improves the mind), a substantivized adjective or participle (The wounded were taken good care of), a numeral (Of course, the two were quite unable to do anything), any other part of speech when it is substantivized (Under is a preposition), a phrase (early to bed, early to rise makes man healthy, wealthy and wise. Twice two is four). Besides, there is also a special kind of subject in English – the complex subject – expressed by different constructions with non-finite verbal forms: For me to ask would be treason, and for me to be told would be treason.
The predicate. The predicate as a rule contains a finite verb which may express tense, mood, voice, aspect, and sometimes person and number. According to the structure we obtain the following two main types – the simple predicate and the compound predicate each divided according to their morphological characteristics into verbal and nominal.
The simple verbal predicate is expressed by a finite verb in a simple or a compound tense form or by a phraseological unit: Mr. Rivarez, I have been looking for you everywhere. The man gave a violent start.
The simple nominal predicate is expressed by a noun or an adjective, without a link verb: My ideas obsolete! “Splendid game, cricket”, remarked Mr.Barbecue-Smith heartily to no one in particular; "so thoroughly English.”
The compound predicate consists, of two parts: a finite verb and some other part of' speech, the latter being the significant part of the predicate.
2. The secondary parts of the sentence. The secondary parts of the sentence
are the object, the attribute and the adverbial modifier.
27. Text as an Object of Linguistic Research.
The text is a unit of language in use. It applies to any passage, spoken or written, of whatever length, that does form a unified whole – a semantic unit. The text is the object of studies of the branch of linguistics called text linguistics. Text lingustics is a relatively new branch of language studies that deals with texts as communication systems. At the early stage of its development in the 60s of the 20th century, text linguistics dealt mainly with ways of expressing cohesion and coherence and distribution of the theme and the rheme of an utterance according to the rules of the functional sentence perspective. Its original aims lay in uncovering and describing text grammars. The application of text linguistics has, however, evolved from this approach to a point in which text is viewed in much broader terms that go beyond a mere extension of traditional grammar towards an entire text.
Contemporary text linguistics studies the text and its structure, its categories and components as well as ways of constructing texts. Text linguistics takes into account the form of the text, but also its setting, i.e. the way in which it is situated in an interactional, communicative context. Both the author of a text (written or spoken) as well as its addressee are taken into consideration in their respective (social and/or institutonal) roles in the specific communicative context. In general it is an application of linguistic analysis at the much broader level of text, rather than just a sentence or word.
The text can be studied as a product (text grammar) or as a process (theory of text). The text-as-a-product approach is focused on the text cohesion, coherence, topical organization, illocutionary structure and communicative functions; the text-as-a-process perspective studies the text production, reception and interpretation.