11 Types of grammatical categories

The term ‘grammatical category’ has been used to cover a wide variety of things, including what traditional grammars call "parts of speech." A grammatical category is a set of syntactic features that:

• express meanings from the same conceptual side

• occur in contrast to each other,

• are typically expressed in the same way.

Examples: a set of verb affixes that express aspect ; a set of auxiliary verbs that express modality. The paradigmatic correlation of gr.features in a category are exposed by “gr. oppositions” by means of which a certain function is expressed. The gr. categories organized in functional paradigmatic oppositions, can either be innate for a given class of words, or only be expressed on the surface of it. The gr. categories should be divided into: 1. “immanent” categories - innate for a given lexemic class, stipulate gr. agreement in lexemes; 2. “reflective” - cat. of secondary derivative semantic value, they are based on subordinate grammatical agreement. According to the changeability factor of the exposed feature: 1. constant (unchangeable) – reflect the static classification of phenomena; it can be seen in the category of gender; 2. variable (changeable) reflect various connections between phenomena.This feature category can be exemplified by the degrees of comparison.

12. Communicative types of sentences

There are 3 cardinal sentence types: declarative, imperative, interrogative. Declarative makes a statement (affirmative or negative), imperative - inducement (affirmative or negative), request, command; interrogative - request for information. Ch. Fries classified them according to responses they elicit. In this system utterance is chosen as a universal speech unit. 1. situation utterances 2. response utterances.Situation utterances were divided into 3 groups:

Followed by oral responses (greetings, calls, questions)

Eliciting an action, response (requests/ commands)

Eliciting signals of attention to continuous discourse (statements)

There also exist non-communicative utterances (characteristic of surprise, anger, pain). Each of communicative sentences can be represented in 2 variants: exclamatory/ non- exclamatory (What a nice dog! /It’s a very nice dog. ). Each communicative type is distinguished by special actual division features, which are revealed in the nature of rheme.

1.Declarative sentences express certain proposition. (rheme makes up centre of the statement.)

2.Imperative sentences express an urge to do or not to do something. (rheme expresses informative nucleus of inducement. Its semantic subject is zeroed).

3.Interrogative s-s express inquiry about information. (rheme is informatively opened)

13 Correlation between formal and functional aspects

The formal & the functional aspects of the morphemes within the composition of a word may be represented with the help of “all-emic” theory put by Descriptive Linguistic. According to this theory, lingual units are described by means of 2 types of terms: all-terms & eme-terms. Eme-terms denote the generalized invariant units of language characterized by a certain functional status: phonemes, morphemes. Allo-terms denote the concrete manifestations, or variants of the generalized units dependent on the regular co-location with other elements of language: allophones, allomorphs. The allo-emic identification is based on the so called “distributional analysis”. The aim of it is to fix and study the units of language in relation to their textual environments. The distribution of a unit is its environment in generalized terms of classes or categories.

2 stages of distributional analysis: 1. the analyzed text is divided into segments consisting of phonemes. 2. The environ. features of the morphs are established and the corresponding identifications are affected. 3 main types of distribution

- contrastive (the environments of the morphs are the same, but meanings are different)

- non-contrastive (if their meaning is the same: suffix ed-t ex.learned-learnt)

- complementary (concerns different environments of different morphs ex: dogs-oxen)

For analytical purposes the notion of complementary d-n is the most important, it helps establish the identity of different elements of language, its grammatical elements.