3. Sentence. Classification of sentences.

The sentence is the immediate integral unit of speech built up of words according to a definite syntactic pattern and distinguished by a contextually relevant communicative purpose. The sentence is the main object of syntax as part of the grammatical theory.

English sentences can be divided into four types:

1. Simple sentence comprises a subject and a predicate (as well as secondary parts of a sentence): She (subject) invited (predicate) us to dinner.

2. Compound sentence unites two independent clauses brought together by a semicolon or a comma + a coordinating conjunction: She keeps telling me to control myself, but she never does herself.

3. Complex sentence consists of the main clause and at least one subordinate clause: Although he is trying to convince me (subordinate clause), I do not believe a single word he says. (Main clause).

4. Compound-complex sentence has two main clauses and one or more subordinate clauses introduced by subordinating conjunctions and joined by a coordinating conjunction: I opened the parcel, but the boy disappeared before I could utter a word.

4. Actual division of sentences.

5. Members of the sentence.

In English, there are seven members of the sentence:

1. the Subject: a member of sentence which describe 'who' or 'what', and is usually undertaken by nouns, pronouns or their equivalents. The Sun rises from the east.

2. the Predicate: it describes the action or situation of the subject, and usually undertaken by verbs or verb phrases. They study very hard.

3. the Predicative: it describes the quality, feature, state or identity, and form compound predicate with linking verbs. It is usually undertaken by nouns, pronouns and adjectives or their equivalents. That river is very deep.

4. the Object: it shows the object or content of the action of a transitive verb, or is put after a preposition to form a prepositional phrase. It is usually undertaken by a noun or pronoun or their equivalents. We all like him.

5. the Complement: it is a supplement of the subject or the object, and is usually undertaken by an adjective or a noun or other proper structures. We consider this task very important.

6. the Attribute: it modifies or restricts nouns, and is usually undertaken by adjectives or their equivalent structures. This is a difficult problem.

7. the Adverbial: it modifies verbs, adjectives, adverbs or the whole sentence, and is usually undertaken by a adverb or its equivalent structures. He runs fast.

6. Morphology in grammar. Morphological structure of the word.

Лексикология

1. Morphological structure of English words. Types of morphemes.

There are two levels of approach to the study of word- structure: the level of morphemic analysis and the level of derivational or word-formation analysis. Word is the principal and basic unit of the language system, the largest on the morphologic and the smallest on the syntactic plane of linguistic analysis.

The morpheme is the smallest meaningful unit of form. A form in these cases a recurring discrete unit of speech. Morphemes occur in speech only as constituent parts of words, not independently, although a word may consist of single morpheme.

The root-morpheme is the lexical nucleus of the word; it has a very general and abstract lexical meaning common to a set of semantically related words constituting one word-cluster, e.g. (to) teach, teacher, teaching.

Affixational morphemes include inflectional affixes or inflections and derivational affixes. Inflections carry only grammatical meaning and are thus relevant only for the formation of word-forms. Derivational affixes are relevant for building various types of words. They are lexically always dependent on the root which they modify. They possess the same types of meaning as found in roots, but unlike root-morphemes most of them have the part-of-speech meaning which makes them structurally the important part of the word as they condition the lexico-grammatical class the word belongs to.

Roots and derivational affixes are generally easily distinguished and the difference between them is clearly felt as, e.g., in the words helpless, handy, blackness, Londoner, refill, etc.: the root-morphemes help-, hand-, black-, London-, fill-, are understood as the lexical centers of the words, and –less, -y, -ness, -er, re- are felt as morphemes dependent on these roots.

Free morphemes coincide with word-forms of independently functioning words. It is obvious that free morphemes can be found only among roots, so the morpheme boy- in the word boy is a free morpheme; in the word undesirable there is only one free morpheme desire-; the word pen-holder has two free morphemes pen- and hold-.

It follows that bound morphemes are those that do not coincide with separate word- forms, consequently all derivational morphemes, such as –ness, -able, -er are bound. Root-morphemes may be both free and bound. The morphemes theor- in the words theory, theoretical, or horr- in the words horror, horrible, horrify; Angl- in Anglo-Saxon; Afr- in Afro-Asian are all bound roots as there are no identical word-forms.

-ion/ -tion/ -sion/ -ation are the positional variants of the same suffix, they do not differ in meaning or function but show a slight difference in sound form depending on the final phoneme of the preceding stem. They are considered as variants of one and the same morpheme and called its allomorphs.

Allomorph is defined as a positional variant of a morpheme occurring in a specific environment and so characterized by complementary description.

Complementary distribution is said to take place, when two linguistic variants cannot appear in the same environment.

Different morphemes are characterized by contrastive distribution, i.e. if they occur in the same environment they signal different meanings. The suffixes –able and –ed, for instance, are different morphemes, not allomorphs, because adjectives in –able mean “ capable of beings”.

Allomorphs will also occur among prefixes. Their form then depends on the initials of the stem with which they will assimilate.

Two or more sound forms of a stem existing under conditions of complementary distribution may also be regarded as allomorphs, as, for instance, in long a: length n.

2. Patterned means of word-formation: derivation, compounding.

3. Non-patterned means of word-formation: shortening, blending, sound interchange, sound imitation, distractive stress, back formation.

Shortening:

Consists in the reduction of a word to one of its parts. Mathematics – maths, Laboratory – lab, Captain – cap, Gymnastics – gym

3 types:1) The first part is left (the commonest type) advertisement – ad

2) The second part is left  telephone – phone, airplane – plane

3) A middle part is left influenza – flu, refrigerator – fridge

Accepted by the speakers of the language clipping can acquire grammatical categories (used in plural forms)

BLENDING

Is blending part of two words to form one word (merging into one word)

Smoke + fog = smog

Breakfast + lunch = brunch

Smoke + haze = smaze (дымка)

- addictive type: they are transformable into a phrase consisting of two words combined by a conjunction “and”

smog → smoke & fog

- blending of restrictive type: transformable into an attributive phrase, where the first element serves as modifier of a second.

Positron – positive electron

Medicare – medical care

SOUND INTERCHANGE

Sound interchange is the way of word building when some sounds are changed to form a new word. It is non-productive in Modern English; it was productive in Old English and can be met in other Indo-European languages.

The causes of sound interchange can be different. It can be the result of Ancient Ablaut which cannot be explained by the phonetic laws during the period of the language development known to scientists., e.g. to strike - stroke, to sing - song etc. It can be also the result of Ancient Umlaut or vowel mutation which is the result of palatalizing the root vowel because of the front vowel in the syllable coming after the root (regressive assimilation), e.g. hot - to heat (hotian), blood - to bleed (blodian) etc.

In many cases we have vowel and consonant interchange. In nouns we have voiceless consonants and in verbs we have corresponding voiced consonants because in Old English these consonants in nouns were at the end of the word and in verbs in the intervocal position, e.g. bath - to bathe, life - to live, breath - to breathe etc.

STRESS INTERCHANGE

Stress interchange can be mostly met in verbs and nouns of Romanic origin: nouns have the stress on the first syllable and verbs on the last syllable, e.g. `accent - to ac`cent. This phenomenon is explained in the following way: French verbs and nouns had different structure when they were borrowed into English; verbs had one syllable more than the corresponding nouns. When these borrowings were assimilated in English the stress in them was shifted to the previous syllable (the second from the end) . Later on the last unstressed syllable in verbs borrowed from French was dropped (the same as in native verbs) and after that the stress in verbs was on the last syllable while in nouns it was on the first syllable. As a result of it we have such pairs in English as: to af`fix -`affix, to con`flict- `conflict, to ex`port -`export, to ex`tract - `extract etc. As a result of stress interchange we have also vowel interchange in such words because vowels are pronounced differently in stressed and unstressed positions.

SOUND IMITATION

It is the way of word building when imitating different sounds forms a word. There are some semantic groups of words formed by means of sound imitation

a) Sounds produced by human beings, such as: to whisper, to giggle, to mumble, to sneeze, to whistle etc.

b) Sounds produced by animals, birds, insects, such as: to hiss, to buzz, to bark, to moo, to twitter etc.

c) Sounds produced by nature and objects, such as: to splash, to rustle, to clatter, to bubble, to ding-dong, to tinkle etc.

The corresponding nouns are formed by means of conversion, e.g. clang (of a bell), chatter (of children) etc.

Back-formation – the formation of a new word by subtracting a real or supposed suffix from the existing words:

butler – to butle

4. Aspects of lexical meaning.