7. Grammatical Category, Meaning and Form

There are 3 fundamental notions: grammatical form, grammatical meaning, and grammatical category.

Notional words possess some morphemic features expressing grammatical meanings. They determine the grammatical form of the word.

Grammatical form is not confined to an individual meaning of the word because grammatical meaning is very abstract & general ex: oats-wheat: The grammatical form of oats is clearly plural and grammatical form of wheat is singular, but we can’t say that oats are more than one& wheat is one. So here we say that oats is grammatical. Plural & wheat is grammatical singular. There is no clear one-to-one correspondence between grammatical category of singular & plural and counting them in reality in terms of “one” and “more than one”.

A very vivid example confirming the rightness of this statement is connected with the category of gender with biological sex ex: bull-cow, so the grammatical form presents a division of a word of the principle of expressing a certain grammatical. meaning.

Grammatical meaning is very abstractive generalized meaning, which is linguistically expressed. ex: Peter’s head -the grammatical meaning of the category of case showing the relations between part and a whole. Grammatical meaning is always expressed either explicitly or implicitly (The book reads well) - here the grammatical. meaning of passivity is expressed implicitly. We express grammatical meaning: Inflexions-pen-pens, Sound alternation- replacive morpheme-man-men, Analitycal means with the help of analytical forms (discontinuous morphemes) Suppletivity-different roots for grammatical forms. I-me/go-went

Grammatical category is a system of expressing a generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms.

Traditional categories are: the category of gender, number, person, case, tense, mood, voice.

.8. Verb: Aspect, Tense, Texis

Verb is a part of speech which denotes an action. Categories: person, number, tense, aspect, voice and mood. Can be expressed by means of affixes, inner flexion and form words. Verbs –transitive, intransitive. an intransitive verb is a verb that has no object. This distinguishes it from a transitive verb, which takes one or more objects. Verbs have finite forms which can be used as predicate of a sentence and non-finite forms may be used as any member of the sentence but the predicate..

Morphological structure-simple, derived (having affixes-decompose), compound (consisting of 2 stems – daydream), composite (consisting of a verb and a postposition of adverbial origin – sit down, go away)

Syntactic function: Notion verbs have full meaning (to write, to read).Auxiliary verbs have lost their meaning and used only as form words. They are used in analytical forms-to do, to have, to be, shall, will, should, would, may.

Link verbs-lost their meaning and are used in the compound nominal predicate

(the house was too big.

The category of tense.This category denotes the relation of the action either to the moment of speaking or to some definite moment in past or future.- tense = the correspondence btw the form of the verb and our concept of time.- present tense: actions simultaneous wrt the time of utterance.- past tense: actions preceding the time of utterance.- future tense: actions following the time of utterance

There are 4 groups of tenses: Indefinite, continuous, Perfect and Perfect Continuous.Each of these forms includes 4 tenses: Present, Past, Future, Future in the Past-future form the point of view of the past. Thus there are 16 tenses in English.

The Category of Aspect shows the way in which the action develops, whether it is in progress or completed.(Manner of Action)