3.4 Примерный перечень вопросов по теории языка Английский язык

Stylistics

1. The subject-matter and aims of stylistics. The connection of stylistics with other linguistic disciplines. The notion of lingua-stylistics. Style in the general and narrower sense. Different approaches to the definition of style. The division of stylistics into phonostylistics, lexical stylistics, syntactical stylistics, text stylistics, stylistics of decoding. Expressive means and stylistic devices. Stylistic differentiation of the modern English vocabulary.

2. The word and its meanings. The general notion of imagery. The word and image. The notion of a trope. Metaphor, personification. Metonymy and its variants. Irony. Antonomasia and its types. Epithet, traditional and genuine epithets. Classification of epithets. Oxymoron, periphrasis, euphemism. Simile. The difference between simile and metaphor. Hyperbole. Pun and zeugma. Synonyms in the stylistic aspect. The functions of synonyms in the text formation. Stylistic use of phraseological units. Phonetic stylistic devices. Alliteration, onomatopoeia, rhythm, rhyme. Graphical expressive means. Punctuation, the use of types. Graphon.

3. Syntactical devices. Inversion and its types. Detachment. Types of repetitions. Parallelism and its types. Chiasm. Enumeration. Aposiopesis. Climax. Antithesis. Asyndeton, polysyndeton, gap-sentence link. Ellipses, question-in-the narrative. The plane of the narrator and the plane of the character (monologue, dialogue, represented speech).Rhetorical question. Litotes. Text level. Types of information in the text: logical and emotive. Passage as a text element. Peculiarities of the passage of an English discourse: cohesion and relevance. Types of thought development. Compositional intensification (“weak/strong”) of the elements in the narration. Types of discourse: argumentation, description, narration.

4. Stylistic analysis at the level of morphology (noun, article, pronoun).Stylistics of the parts of speech. The notion of transposition. The Noun: stylistic potential of the article, plural form, genitive form. The Pronoun, the adjective, the verb, the adverb and their stylistic potential.

5. The notion of a functional style. Classification of styles. The notions of register and sublanguage. Functional styles as fields of discourse. The style of official documents and its subtypes. The major and minor features of its subtypes. The scientific prose functional style and its subtypes. The newspaper functional style, its subtypes and peculiarities. Publicistic functional style. The combination of logical argumentation and emotional impact on the recipient. The belles-lettres functional style and its subtypes. Types of discourse and their connection with functional styles.

Lexicology

1. Etymological survey of the English word-stock. Words of native origin. Borrowings. Interrelation between native and borrowed elements.

2. Various ways of forming words in English: affixation, conversion, word-composition. Minor ways of word-building (shortening, sound-imitation, reduplication, back-formation).

3. Phraseology. Criteria of phraseological units. Principles of classification. Ways of forming.

4. Fundamentals of English lexicography. The main types of English dictionaries. Some basic problems of dictionary-compiling. Learner’s dictionaries and some problems of their compilation.

5. The main variants of the English language. Local varieties in the British Isles and the USA.

Theoretical Phonetics

1. The phonetic system of a language. Aspects of sound phenomena. Phonetics as a science, the object of its investigation, the main branches of phonetics, interdisciplinary overlaps( phonetics and other sciences). The Articulation Basis of English. The system of English Speech Sounds. Articulatory peculiarities of the English language. Two main types of speech sounds (vowels and consonants), their distinctive features and articulatory classification.

2. The Phoneme. Modifications of Phonemes in Speech. The Phonemic Inventory of English. The phoneme and allophones. The phoneme as a dialectal unity of three aspects. The phenomenon sound variation. Reasons and types of sound variation. Allophonic variation. Types of allophonic modifications of sounds. Problems of phonological analysis. Two main methods of phonological analysis

3. The Syllable as a Phonetic and Phonological Unit. The definition of a syllable. Structural types of a syllable. The problem of syllable division and different approaches to the problem. The expiratory theory of syllable division. The general concepts of Jespersen's theory. Shcherba's theory of muscular tension. The phonotactic peculiarities of English. Functions of a syllable.

4. Word-stress. Types of word-stress. The stress patterns of English. Word-stress and utterance stress. Linguistically relevant degrees of word-stress: primary, secondary and weak. Types of word-stress according to the stability of its position. Types of word-stress according to its nature, in general, and of English word stress, in part. Functions of word-stress. The accentual tendencies in English.

5. Utterance Prosody. Prosodic Units. Prosodic Subsystems. The Functional Aspect of Prosody. Intonation and prosody, correlation of the terms. Prosodic units (a syllable, a rhythmic group, an intonation group, an utterance). Prosodic subsystems (pitch, utterance stress, rhythm, pauses).Functions of prosody. The problem of prosodic interference. Features of Russian-English prosodic interference.

Theoretical Grammar

1. The distinction between language and speech. Grammar as a part of language. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations. Approaches to the division of Grammar into morphology and syntax. Grammatical meaning. The difference between lexical and grammatical meaning. Grammatical form. Means of form-building. Synthetic and analytical grammatical forms. Grammatical category. The paradigm. The method of binary oppositions as a method of revealing grammatical categories. Types of oppositions.

2. The noun as a part of speech (general characteristics). The category of number. The problem of the category of gender. The oppositonal structure of the category. The theory denying the existence of the category of case in modern English. The problem of analytical cases. The traditional view on the system of cases in English.

3. The adjective as a part of speech (general characteristics). Semantic classification of adjectives. The problem of the number of forms of degrees of comparison. The problem of analytical forms of comparison.

4. The English verb (general characteristics). The notion of time. The category of tense. Lexical classification of verbs into terminative and durative. The category of aspect. The English and the Russian aspects compared. The category of order. Lexical classification of verbs into transitive and intransitive. The category of voice. The problems of the reflexive, reciprocal, middle voices. The problem of the number of moods in English. Peculiarities of moods.

5. The problem of the definition of the phrase. The phrase and the sentence. Syntactic relations within a phrase. The definition of the sentence. Predicativity. Predication. Primary and secondary predication. Classification of sentences. Actual sentence division. Principal parts of the sentence. The subject. Introductory ‘it’ and ‘there’. The predicate.