65. Grammatical category and its characteristic features. Grammatical Classes of Words

M.Y. Blokh defines the grammatical category as "a system of expressing a generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms". It’s a unity of form & mean-g. 1)The general notion on which a gram. category grounds is gram. mean-g. 2)The forms united into a grammatical category possess a common general meaning that gives a name to the category and each form possesses its own specific meaning that presents a specification of the general meaning and differentiates the form from the other form/forms within the category. The forms lives - lived - will live are united on the basis of the common general grammatical meaning of tense and constitute the grammatical category of tense. Within this category each form has its own specific meaning of tense: present, past and future. 3) gram. categories don’t nominate objects or units of lang., instead they express relations between lang. units. The grammatical category of tense presents a specific lingual expression of objective time, the grammatical category of case presents various relations between the action and its participants, the grammatical category of number in nouns reflects the quantitative relations between homogeneous objects of reality, the grammatical category of mood presents the relations between the action and reality as they are presented by the speaker etc. Such grammatical categories may also be called inherent (неотъемлемый, присущий). 4) Conceptual (понятийные) grammatical categories are universal, they exist in most of the languages though their volume and their scope may vary considerably in various languages. Gram. cat-s represent lang. realization of universal cat-s of human thinking. That’s why gram. cat-s typical of a particular lang. are unique. The grammatical category of number is the most universal grammatical category, all speech communities have linguistic means of encoding number, though these means differ greatly in different languages. 5) A grammatical category is constituted on the basis of contrastive grammatical forms which share a certain grammatical meaning correlated to some general concept (time, number) and differ in more concrete meanings within the scope of the same concept. Such contrastive grammatical forms are called oppositions and all grammatical categories are based on oppositions. The method of oppositional analysis was introduced by Trubetskoy . Now the method of oppositional analysis is widely used in lexicology and grammar. 66. Parts of speech and different principles of their classification.

The general definition of a part of speech: it is a lexical-grammatical word class which is characterized by a general abstract grammatical meaning, expressed in certain grammatical markers. Within a part of speech similar grammatical features are common to all words belonging to this class.

A part of speech is a mixed lexical-grammatical phenomenon, because:

1) Words are characterized by individual lexical meanings. 2) Each generalized class of words (noun/verb/adj., etc) has a unifying abstract gram. meaning, for ex.: noun – substance, verb – process, adjective – quality of substance, adverb – quality of process. 3) Some parts of speech are capable of representing gram. meaning in a set of formal exponents; for ex.: the plural of nouns is expressed with suffix –s (this feature is not universal in all languages).

PS are distinguished from one another by the number of wds in each class. The greatest number of wds is found in the noun & verb. The N&V correspond to the subj.&pred. of the sent., they’re usually the center of predication.

Modern classification of parts of speech is traced back to ancient Greek. Later this classification was applied to Latin and thus it found its way in modern languages. The present day classification of parts of speech is severely criticized, when it’s applied to languages the structure of which is different to the structure of the Latin language. So the criticism is easily justified. On the other hand the traditional division of words into parts of speech seems quiet natural and easy to understand & remember from the logical point of view. So it’s not the classification itself that is wrong but it must be the principles of classification that should be criticized and reviewed.

Classifying a lang. from the view point of PS, there are the following principles:

1) Semantic: the general mean-g of a PS doesn’t coincide with a lex. or gram.mean-g of every individual word, but it’s closely connected with it. Thus the gen. mean-g of a PS is neither lex. nor gram., but it’s to be called lexical-grammatical. Ex. nouns are characterized by substantivity, verbs- actions & states, which together mean processes, adj-s- attributes of substances, etc.

2) Morphological: it has 2 aspects: a) deals with morphol. categories (each PS possesses certain morphol. cat-s which are not found in other PS): ex. nouns- case & number , adj.- comparison, verbs- 7 categories. This aspect is more important.b) the use of form-build. affixes (deriv. affixes sometimes can be found within this or that PS only): ex. nouns- -ment, -ion, -ness. But deriv. affixes may be highly confusing: ex. –ly: friendly(adj), daily(noun), kindly(adv.), possibly (modal wd)

3) Syntactic: a) the role of a wd in a sent. (dif. synt. Functions are typical of dif. PS); b) the combinability of wds/ the syntactical distribution (распределение): ex. noun can combine with prepositions, articles, adj-s, other nouns, verbs.

4) Functional: PS- a field that has a core & a periphery.