8)Semantic, morphological, and syntactic categories. Notional categories and their

relation to Grammar.

Nowadays Grammar makes use of a lot of theories and synthesizes them. One of the

main problems of modern Grammar is the analysis of notional categories (NC).

NC may be related to a number of branches of knowledge linguistic proper and

cognate to linguistics (the study of speech generating process, psycholinguistics,

comutaprocessing of Texts, artificial intelligent). The term ‘NC’ was introduced by

Otto Jesperson in the work ‘The Philosophy of Grammar in 1924’: “Above the syntactic

categories, which depend on the structure of each members, there are some extralinguistic

categories which are more or less independent, these are universal categories and they

are applicable to all languages. NC face both the universal categories and laws of logic

on the one hand, on the other – lingual material, which is overtly expressed. Being

connected to logic and psychology, they belong to neither => they possess relatively

independent status.”

NC vs. semantic categories

There is no one-to-one correspondence between them; NC are more closely connected

with the real world, then the semantic categories (semantic cat – sphere of language,

NC - speech). Thus, there may be some asymmetry between the plane of notions and

semantics. E.g., The builders are constructing the house (correspondence of notional

and semantic categories of agent – they are explicated through ‘builders’)

The house is being constructed (semantic category of agent is not to be found ‘cause

there is no linguistic sign, still the agent as the notional category is clearly state in

the mind). E.g., the category of evaluation – not a grammatical category, but is usually

expressed by grammatical means (It’s fabulous) or with the help of syntactic structures

(I believe that); it has nothing to do with any morphological category. Or the category

of negation – in reality we have no negation, there are some polar phenpmena (change of

day/night, water/ice), besides we use affirmative structures parallel to negative ones

(they are even sometimes more preferable). He is not present – He is absent. He has

not come – He failed to come. Or the category of determination (definite vs. indefinite) –

person thinks of something as definite depending on the degree of cognition; it is

linguistically expressed with the held of intonation, word order, articles and so on. We

have the morphological category of determination of English nouns (specific only about

morphological change of forms of Eng nouns). (There is some difference between all the

types of categories: morphological – only to 1 part of speech, syntactic – on the level of

syntactic structures, semantic – broader, both morphological, syntactic, suprasentential

means, notional – universal, non dependent on a language).