GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY, MEANING, AND FORM
УДК 802.0-5 (075.8) БЕК 81.2 Англ - 923 П75
Прибыток И.И.
П75 Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка: Учеб. пособие для студентов Ш - IV курсов лингвист, специальностей / И.И. Прибыток. - Саратов: Изд-во Научная книга, 2006. - 408 с.
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Учебное пособие включает в себя лекции по основным проблемным вопросам морфологии и синтаксиса английского языка. В конце пособия приводится список теоретической литературы, которую студенты могут использовать при подготовке к семинарским занятиям.
Для студентов III - IV курсов лингвистических специальностей.
Выражаю искреннюю благодарность П.С. Жуйковой, О.А. Уфимцевой и Н.В. Шершуковой за помощь при подготовке пособия к печати.
Любимому учителю
Настоящему ученому
Кристально честному человеку
ОЛЬГЕ БОРИСОВНЕ СИРОТИНИНОЙ
посвящается
MORPHOLOGY 1. INTRODUCTION Why Study Grammar?
The study of grammar goes back to the time of the ancient Greeks, Romans, and Indians, and from its earliest days has caught the interest of the learned and the wise. As a result, the subject has developed around itself a scholarly, and somewhat mysterious atmosphere. In the popular mind, grammar was practised chiefly by a race of shadowy people, grammarians, and was of no practical use to ordinary people.
The early English grammars met with a negative reaction for two reasons.
1. Textual samples selected for analysis or commentary were
commonly taken from literary, religious, or scholarly sources.
Informal styles of speech were ignored, or condemned as incorrect.
This meant that the language which most children used and heard
around them received no positive reinforcement in grammar
lessons. To many, accordingly, the subject became distant and
unreal.
2. Children were made to analyze English texts by applying
the categories and terminology of Latin grammar which were alien
to English. To many, accordingly, the subject seemed arbitrary and
arcane.
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Nowadays, things have changed fundamentally. Modem linguists take pains to set up their rules following a careful analysis of the way the English language actually works. Nonetheless, there is no gainsaying the fact that English grammar is far from being simple.
If you want to communicate intelligibly, however, you must know grammar because the rules controlling the way a communication system works are known as its grammar [D. Crystal]. People master the grammar of the native and foreign languages in different ways. Mastering the grammar of the native language is to a considerable degree an unconscious process, especially when we are young children. Mastering the grammar of a foreign language is a conscious, reflective process.
The History of English Grammars
There does not exist a generally accepted periodization of the history of English grammars, but it is possible to divide it into two periods. The first period is the age of pje_scientific__^ammar beginning at the end of the 16th century and lasting till about 1900. It includes two types of grammars: early descriptive and prescriptive. Early descriptive grammarians [e.g. W. Bullokar] merely described language phenomena.
By the middle of the 18th century, when many of the grammatical phenomena of English had been described, descriptive grammar gave way to prescriptive grammar [R. Lowth], which stated strict rules of grammatical usage. The main drawback of prescriptive grammar lies in the fact that it subjected to criticism many constructions and forms used by educated English people.
The second period is the age of s,ci_ejitific.grammar. By the end of the 19th century, prescriptive grammar had reached the peak of its development. A need was felt for a grammar of a higher type, which could give a scientific explanation of the grammatical phenomena. The appearance of H. Sweet's grammar in 1891 met this demand.
There are three chief methods of explaining language phenomena, namely by means of: 1) historical grammar, 2) comparative grammar, and 3) general grammar.
Historical grammar tries to explain the phenomena of a language by studying their history. Thus. Old English nouns had gender, number, and case distinctions. There were three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), two numbers (singular and plural), and four cases (nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative). The decay of noun inflections that began in the Middle English period is due to the following:
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1) the functional devaluation of inflections: some of their
syntactic functions came to be expressed by prepositions and word
order, i.e. by analytical means;
2) the Scandinavian invasion. The two languages (English and
Scandinavian) were closely related. Since the roots of the words
often sounded alike, the speakers tended to ignore the inflections
which hindered the process of communication.
The loss of inflections, which began in the Middle English period, resulted in the disappearance of the grammatical category of gender and the reduction of the case paradigm in Modern English to two forms: common and genitive.
Comparative grammar compares the grammatical phenomena of a language with those of cognate languages, i.e. languages that are related to it through having arisen from a common parent language. Thus, the suppletive case system of personal pronouns is common to all the languages of the Indo-European family. Cf.:
Russian: x-Meux;
English: I-me;
German: ich - mich.
General grammar is not concerned with the details of one language or a family of languages, but with the general principles which underlie the grammatical phenomena of all languages. Thus, all languages, according to H. Greenberg, have pronominal categories involving at least three persons and two numbers.
The period of scientific grammar may be divided into two parts, the first - from the appearance of H. Sweet's book till the 3940's, when there were only two types of grammars: prescriptive [J.C. Nesfield] and explanatory [C.T. Onions; H.R. Stokoe; G. Curme; H. Poutsma; E. Kruisinga; O. Jespersen]; the second -from the 1940's, when several new types of grammars appeared: 1) structural (descriptive) grammar, 2) transformational grammar, 3) communicatively orientated grammar, 4) semantically orientated grammar, 5) pragmatically orientated grammar, 6) textual grammar.
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The aim of structural grammar [Ch. Fries] is to give a formalized description of language system as it exists, without being concerned with questions of correct and incorrect usage.
The purpose of transformational grammar [Z. Harris; N. Chomsky] is to show how different sentences are derived from a few kernel sentences, e.g.:
The door opened. —» The door did open. —» Did the door open?
Communicatively orientated grammar [V. Mathesius; J. Firbas] studies the theme-rheme integration in a sentence. The theme is a part of a sentence seen as corresponding to what the sentence as a whole, when uttered in a particular context, is about. The rheme is a part of a sentence communicating information relative to whatever is indicated by the theme. For instance, in Our biggest problem is lack of money (Longman Language Activator), the theme is our biggest problem, and the point of the sentence is to explain what it is. The rheme, then, is lack of money.
Semantically orientated grammar [Ch.J. Fillmore; W.L. Chafe] concentrates its attention on the semantic structure of sentences.
Pragmatically orientated grammar [J. Austin; J. Searle] focuses its attention on the functional side of language units.
Textual grammar places text in focus. The authors suggest different methods of text analysis ranging from formal [Z. Harris] to semantic [T. van Dijk] and pragmatic [V. Bogdanovj. The aims of the analysis are also different. The authors of the first period [Z. Harris; V. Waterhouse] put forward the idea of the dependence of the text type on the type of sentences making it up. The authors of the second period [W. Hendricks; T. van Dijk] explore the text as a whole and try to discover the lower units which constitute the given text. M.A.K. Halliday makes an attempt at giving a theoretical basis of text grammar.
Objects and Tasks of Grammar
Grammar may be regarded either from a practical or a theoretical point of view. From the practical point of view, grammar is the art of language. The main object of practical grammar is to help the student acquire master)' of the native or foreign language. From the theoretical point of view, grammar is the science of language. The task of theoretical grammar is to provide an insight into the structure of the language under examination in the light of the general principles of linguistics. The latter requires serious consideration of moot points with an obligatory suggestion of a way to solve the particular problem involved. In other words, practical
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grammar is prescriptive, while theoretical grammar pursues analytical aims.
The Main Branches of Grammar
The field of grammar is generally divided into two domains: morphology and syntax. Morphology studies the grammatical structure of words and the categories realized by them. Thus, a morphological analysis will divide the word girls into the root girl and the inflection -s, which realizes the plural number. Syntax studies the grammatical relations between words and other units within the sentence.
Most of a traditional grammar of English was devoted to aspects of morphology, called accidence in those days. Accidence is defined by J.C. Nesfield as 'the collective name for all those changes that are incidental to certain parts of speech.' Thus, accidence dealt with such matters as the number, gender, and case of nouns, and the voice, mood, number, person, and tense of verbs, as well as the question of their classification into regular and irregular types. Although syntactic matters in J.C. Nesfield's grammar are to be found throughout the book, only two chapters are officially assigned to the subject.
By contrast, most of a modern grammar of English is given over to syntax. There is relatively little in the English language to be accounted for under the heading of inflectional morphology, and in some grammars the notion of morphology is dispensed with altogether, its concerns being handled as the 'syntax of the word'.
2. MORPHOLOGICAL UNITS
Grammatical units represent bilateral elements possessing a directly observable material structure and directly unobservable content (or meaning). They form a hierarchy of interconnected elements, a rank scale. The position of a unit on this or that step of the rank scale depends on its size: the longer is the unit, the higher is its position on the scale.
The lowest grammatical unit is the morpheme. L. Bloomfield defines the morpheme as 'a minimal meaningful unit'. It is not clear from his definition what kind of meaning is understood. There are,
as is well-known, inflectional, i.e. grammatical, and derivational, i.e. lexical morphemes. Inflectional morphemes form new grammatical forms of the same word, e.g.:
play -plays -played.
Derivational morphemes form one word from another, e.g.:
govern — government.
A comparison of inflectional and derivational morphemes has led J. Muir to the conclusion that they are radically different. Inflectional morphemes are not recursive; only one inflectional morpheme may occur in the structure of any word, e.g.: runs. Derivational morphemes may be recursive, e.g.:
boy + ish + ness.
If both a derivational and an inflectional morpheme occur in the structure of a word, then the derivational morpheme must precede the inflectional morpheme, e.g.:
novel + ist +s.
Inflectional morphemes form morphological sets, e.g.:
eat — eats - ate - eating ~ eaten.
Derivational morphemes do not form morphological sets and so cannot be fully accounted for in grammar; they may be considered to be on the border of grammar and lexicology. Russian linguists single out word formation (cjioeoo6po3oeanue) into a specific branch of linguistics, clearly distinct both from morphology and lexicology.
An inflectional morpheme as a unit of morphology is an exponent of grammatical meaning. The grammatical meaning of an inflectional morpheme is purely relational: it is revealed only by contrast with some other morpheme. Thus; the morpheme -ed is felt to render the meaning of the past tense because it is opposed to the morpheme -(e)s of the present tense.
Inflectional morphemes are always bound morphemes. They cannot occur alone; they always form part of a grammeme (or word form).
The next grammatical unit on the rank scale is the word (a free naming unit) and its grammeme [I.B. Khlebnikova], When we speak of a word as a grammeme we disregard its lexical meaning but concentrate our attention on the kind of grammatical information it gives, e.g. the grammeme speaks shows the present tense, third person, singular number. A grammeme may be analytical in
structure, e.g. has spoken. An analytical grammeme is equivalent to one word on the rank scale as it expresses one lexical and one grammatical meaning.
Inflectional morphemes and grammemes are characterized by a definite material structure of their own. (I.B. Khlebnikova does not recognize the existence of the so-called zero inflectional morphemes, as 'zero', in her opinion, means no morpheme at all.). They can be registered and enumerated in any language. Therefore, the system of morphological units is a closed system.
Not every word, especially in analytical languages, is at the same time a grammeme. For instance, the noun milk is not a grammeme because it is not marked either for the grammatical category of case or the grammatical category of number common to English nouns. Nevertheless, I.B. Khlebnikova holds that every word is a unit of grammar as a part of speech. Parts of speech are usually considered a lexico-grammatical category since, on the one hand, they show lexical groupings of words; on the other, these groupings present generalized classes, each with a unified abstract meaning of its own. The latter makes parts of speech a grammatical notion since wide-range abstraction is characteristic of grammar.
The linguistic relationships between forms fall into two fundamentally distinct types: syntagmatic and paradigmatic. R. Quirk, S. Greenbaum, G. Leech and L Svartvik call syntagmatic relationships chain relationships, paradigmatic relationships -choice relationships. The chain relationship is an 'and' relationship, whereas the choice relationship is an 'or' relationship. Thus, if two units X and Y occur one after another in a larger unit, they are in a chain relationship: X + Y, e.g.:
The rain has stopped (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English).
But if X and 7 can be substituted for one another in a larger unit, they are in a choice relationship: X/Y, e.g.:
I saw the cat/dog/house (P.H. Matthews).
Inflectional morphemes, words as parts of speech, and grammemes are paradigmatic by nature. They unite similar units on one paradigmatic axis to form a paradigm in which units relate to each other by association with some category. For instance, the inflectional morphemes and grammemes of tense form a paradigm the members of which are associated on the ground of the
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grammatical category of tense e.g.: plays - played - will play. Words as parts of speech are characterized by a set of paradigms predetermined by the part of speech nature of the word, e.g. nouns have number and case paradigms.
But inflectional morphemes, words as parts of speech, and grammemes are not purely paradigmatic. They possess certain syntagmatic characteristics, too. The syntagmatic properties of inflectional morphemes are realized at the grammeme level; the syntagmatic properties of words as parts of speech and grammemes are realized at the word combination, sentence, and sentencoid levels.
The paradigmatics of inflectional morphemes, words as parts of speech, and grammemes makes up the morphological system of the language [I.B. Khlebnikova].
GRAMMATICAL CATEGORY, MEANING, AND FORM
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