- •The word.
- •2. The morpheme.
- •Be…ing – for the continuous verb forms
- •Categorical structure of the word
- •Parts of Speech
- •The Noun
- •Category of number
- •The category of case
- •Category of Gender (expression of gender)
- •Category of Animateness - Inanumateness
- •Category of Definiteness - Indefiniteness
- •The Article as a Part of Speech
- •The Verb
- •The Category of Tense
- •The Figurative Use of the Present
- •Summary
- •The category of aspect Category of Aspect
- •Category of Correlation (категория временной отнесенности)
- •The category of mood
- •Other means of expressing modality
- •Category of voice
- •Questions
- •Verbals
- •The Infinitive and Infinitive constructions
- •Functions of the infinitive
- •Functions of the ing-forms
- •Questions
- •Adjective
- •Degrees of comparison as a grammatical category
- •Subordinate word-groups Subordinate word-groups fall into two parts: the head (an independent component) and the adjunct (a dependent component)
- •Subordinate word-groups can be classified:
- •Predicative word-groups
- •Classification of Sentences
- •The Subject
- •The Predicate
- •Predicatives or Predicative Complements
- •Secondary Parts of the Sentence
- •Objective Complements or Objects
- •The Extension
- •The Attribute
- •Means of Marking the Rheme in English
- •Transition from Simple to Composite Sentences
- •Sentences with Homogeneous Parts
- •Sentences with a dependent appendix
- •Secondary Predication
- •The Composite Sentence
- •Types and Means of Connection in a Composite Sentence
- •Word order as a Means of Subordination in English
- •The Compound Sentence
- •The Complex Sentence
- •Complex Sentences with Subject clauses
- •Complex Sentences with Object Clauses
- •Complex Sentences with Attribute Clauses
- •Complex Sentences with Adverbial Clauses
- •Inserted Clauses
- •Word Order
The Extension
The extensions are adverbial modifiers, which are adjuncts of adjectives and adverbs (modifiers of modifiers). E.g. You speak too loud.
The Attribute
The most difficult question in the study of the attribute is its position in its general system of parts of the sentence. The question is this: is the attribute a secondary part of the sentence standing on the same level with the object and the adverbial modifier, or is it a unit of a lower rank?
Prof. Ilyish is in favor of the view that the attribute is a part of a phrase, rather than the sentence.
The attribute is a word or a group of words, which is an adjunct of a noun or substantivized part of speech. E.g. A voice inside, the man there, something to remind me of.
The attribute can be expressed by a noun, adjective, adverb, numeral, a verbal, a pronoun, etc. It can be prepositive or postpositive, depending on the morphological peculiarities or stylistic factors.
An attribute expressed by a prepositional phrase, an adverb is usually postpositive. Postpositive attributes are sometimes characteristic of official style of speech: Cf. Next Monday – Monday next, from times immemorial, those present semantically the attribute may be qualitative (deep sea), quantitative (many children), circumstantial (man there).
A variant of an attribute is the apposition – a noun placed at the side of another noun to characterize a person or thing the head word denotes by indicating the class or group to which this person or idea belongs: aunt Mary, Professor Brown, the city of New York, the battle of Moscow, a flower of a girl.
Sometimes transformational analysis helps to distinguish between the attribute and the apposition: woman doctor – a doctor that is woman; but child psychology – psychology that is … a child?!
The apposition may be a 1) close or 2) loose one.
Doctor Brown, 2) Leo Tostoy, the great Russian writer.
A close apposition enters into such close relations with its head noun that they form a group with one stress. The head noun is often a proper noun, the name of a person; the apposition denotes rank, profession, relationship, etc. E.g. Doctor Watson, Major Smith, Peter the Great.
A loose apposition follows the head word and has the force of a descriptive attribute. E.g. He is a good boy, your cousin Val.
Sentence and Communication (Functional Sentence perspective)
A sentence carries a communication. A sentence is a unit of language. Communication is a unit of thought. Communication falls into 2 parts: ‘the known’ (also called the topic, the logical subject, the theme) and ‘the new’ (the comment, the logical predicate, the rheme). The portion of the sentence, which is ‘the known’ expresses the starting point of the communication, whereas ‘the new’ contains new information. The former is usually the subject (or the subject-group) of the sentence, the latter is the predicate (or the predicate-group). E.g. The girl (the known) had a little basket in her hand (the new).
The most important semantic element in the communication, which is part of ‘the new’, is called the center of a communication. In the given sentence it is ‘a little basket’. There are sentences, which carry only new information. E.g. It is evening. The whole sentence is ‘the new’ the grammatical subject ‘it’ has no lexical meaning and cannot be the starting point of the communication.
There are many sentences in which the grammatical structure does not coincide with its communicative structure, i.e. ‘the new’ may be part of the subject-group. E.g. in the corner stood a table set for three. The grammatical subject is the center of the communication.
60% of the total are sentences, in which the communicative division coincides with their grammatical division. In connected speech the center of communication of a sentence may become the starting point of the sentence that follows. E.g. Cora and Alan were sitting in a cab (center). The cab (the known) slowed down near the theatre.
A better term for ‘the known’, the starting point of the action is ‘the theme’, and for ‘the new’, the center of communication is ‘the rheme’. They came into use lately, particularly in the works of several Czech linguists. The terms ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ are both derived from Greek