Grammatical category

Grammatical category is the central notion of grammar (in its narrow sense). Grammatical category is the unity of grammatical meaning and formal means of its representation. Grammatical categories relate to conceptual categories, generalized abstract notions represented by a number of individual members. However, grammatical and conceptual categories are not identical terms. Grammatical categories are only those notional categories which can be manifested with grammatical means. Cf. continuous aspect of verbs: a grammatical category in English, but a lexical category in Ukrainian and Russian, where it is represented with lexemes.

Grammatical meaning as a part of the grammatical category is represented by a respective conceptual, or notional, category. Grammatical meaning differs from lexical meaning:

1. grammatical meaning is more abstract, while lexical meaning is more concrete;

2. grammatical meaning is shared by many linguistic units (e.g. the meanings ‘noun’, ‘nominative case’, ‘singular number’, ‘masculine gender’, etc.), while lexical meaning is manifested by one word only (e.g. ‘cat’, ‘apple’, ‘wolf’);

3. grammatical meaning (e.g. the category of gender) focuses on information about the language, while lexical meaning (e.g. CAT). focuses on information about the experiential world.

Formal means of representing grammatical meaning:

• External inflection, or ending, is an affix which is added at the end of a word. It does not alter the word class of the stem to which it is attached, and it does not alter the lexical meaning of this stem. External inflections tend to be polysemantic: one and the same inflection manifests several grammatical meanings at a time, e.g. Ukr. вікн-о (singular, neuter gender, nominative case).

• Internal inflection is the change of a vowel in the mid of a word stem, e.g. Eng. foot – feet, man – men (singular :: plural), buy – bought, think – thought (present tense :: past tense).

• Infix is an affix inserted in the mid of a word, e.g. Latin vi-n-co ‘I win’ (indicative aspect), cf. vici ‘I have won’ (perfect aspect).

• Suppletion, a relationship between forms with different roots, e.g. Eng. go – went (present tense :: past tense), good – better (positive degree :: comparative degree); Russ. человек – люди (singular :: plural).

• Reduplication is repetition of a word or its part, e.g. Latin mordeo ‘I bite’ – momordi ‘I have bitten’ (indefinite aspect :: perfect aspect).

• Agglutination is stringing forms together by means of adding several affixes to the root; each affix has a particular grammatical meaning, e.g. Turkish ogli-lar-la ‘sons GEN’, oda-lar-la ‘rooms GEN’: -lar PL, -la GEN. Agglutination is typical of Turkish and Hungarian-Finnish families, of Japanese and Swahili.

• Form words, or grammatical words function solely to express a grammatical meaning, e.g. Eng. articles a, (noun, singular) the (noun), particle to (verb, infinitive), auxiliary and link verbs (verb tenses). Ukr. particle би (conditional mood).

• Prepositions are words that typically precede a noun phrase to form a single structural unit. This unit manifests the meaning of a noun case or functions as an adverbial, e.g. Eng. of the house (GENITIVE), to the house (DATIVE, adverbial), in the house (LOCATIVE, adverbial).

• Postpositions are words that follow a noun phrase to form a single structural unit similar to that with a preposition. In post-positional languages, like Japanese or Panjaby, the structures look like ‘the house of’, ‘the house to’, ‘the house in’.

• Word order is a means of representing grammatical meaning in languages with no or scarce morphological forms, e.g. Chinese, English. In these languages the word order, which is invariable, helps to identify word classes and the parts a sentence. E.g. Eng. They work down the river. Work gives you money. The down part of the hill is treeless.

• Prosody as a formal grammatical medium is the change of stress or intonation resulting in the change of grammatical meaning. E.g. Eng. object (noun) – object (verb); Ukr. вікна (plural, NOM) – вікна (singular, GEN). In tone languages, such as Chinese, differences in morphological and syntactic categories can be manifested through intonation. In European languages, intonation and stress serve to distinguish the communicative types of utterances, e.g. Ukr. Він поїхав на Канари (statement). Він поїхав на Канари? (question). Він поїхав на КАНАРИ! (exclamation).

A set of different formal means that manifest one and the same grammatical meaning are called a grammeme /’gr emi:m/. E.g. English plural of nouns: {external inflections -s /s/, /z/, /is/ (cat – cats, dog – dogs, fox – foxes), -en (child – children, ox – oxen), -a (datum – data, stratum – strata; phenomenon – phenomena, criterion – criteria), -ae (formula – formulae, antenna – antennae), -i (focus – foci), -es (hypothesis – hypotheses), -ices (index – indices, matrix – matrices); internal inflection (tooth – teeth, mouse – mice)}.

Types of grammatical categories. Grammatical categories are relevant for words, word forms, syntactic positions, and syntactic constructions.

• Grammatical categories of words are exhibited by word classes and sub-classes. E.g. the Noun, common names, proper names, class nouns, group nouns, collective nouns, nouns of material, abstract nouns; the Adjective, qualitative adjectives, relative adjectives.

• Grammatical categories of word forms represent the types of word modifications within one and the same class, e.g. number, case, gender for nouns; degrees of comparison for adjectives. Grammatical categories of word forms may have complete and incomplete representation in particular linguistic units. Complete representation means that a unit has a complete set of respective grammatical forms, e.g. Ukr. a complete set of case forms for the nouns студент, підручник, стіл; a complete set of tense forms for the verbs to write, to read, to ask. Incomplete representation means the existence of an abridged set of grammatical forms, e.g. Ukr. only singular forms for the nouns студентство, навчання, молоко; only plural forms for the nouns шахмати, ножниці, окуляри; only singular nominative case forms for the nouns кіно, радіо, какао; Engl. an abridged set of tense and voice forms for the modal verbs must, can, may.

• Grammatical categories of syntactic positions distinguish the parts of a sentence, such as the subject and predicate, an object, attribute, and adverbial modifier.

• Grammatical categories of syntactic constructions represent the types of syntactic patterns, e.g. a phrase with coordination, a phrase with subordination, nominal phrase, verbal phrase, prepositional phrase, etc.; simple sentence, compound sentence, complex sentence, compound-complex sentence; principal clause, subordinate clause, subject clause, predicative clause, object clause, attributive clause, adverbial clause.

Grammatical categories of different languages do not coincide. The two major cases are:

1. One and the same grammatical category exists in two compared languages, but it is manifested by different formal means, e.g. perfect aspect: in English – analytical forms with the auxiliary verb to have (I have written a letter); in Ukrainian – synthetic forms with a prefix (Я написав листа).

2. The grammatical category exists in one language, while it does not exist in another, e.g. Ukrainian, Russian, Latin and German have the grammatical category of gender, while there is no such category in English, Armenian and Turkish, where the respective meanings are expressed lexically.

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