- •1) The subject of theoretical grammar. The scope of linguistics.
- •2) The grammatical structure of the English language.
- •3) Morphology and syntax as two main parts of grammar.
- •4) Language as a system and structure. Language levels. The notion of isomorphism.
- •5) The dichotomy of language and speech.
- •6) Systemic relations in language. Syntagmatic relations.
- •7) Systemic relations in language. Paradigmatic relations.
- •8) Linguistic units and their peculiarities.
- •9) The morpheme as an elementary meaningful unit. Classification of morphemes.
- •10) The word as the smallest naming unit and the main unit of morphology.
- •11) Lexical and grammatical aspects of the word. Types of grammatical meanings.
- •12) Grammatical (morphological) categories. The notion of opposition as the basis of grammatical categories.
- •13) Oppositional analysis. Types of oppositions.
- •15) Grammatical categories in communication. Reduction of grammatical opposition.
- •16) Parts of speech. Different approaches to the classification of parts of speech.
- •17) Criteria for establishing parts of speech: semantic, formal and functional. Notional and functional parts of speech.
- •18) The noun as a part of speech. Morphological, semantic and syntactic properties of the noun. Grammatically relevant classes of nouns.
- •19) The category of number. Formal and functional features of the number category. The problem of number in different subclasses of nouns.
- •20) The category of case. The evolution of theoretical interpretations of the category of case in English.
- •21) The problem of gender in English. Personal pronouns as gender indicators of nouns. Sex distinctions in the system of the noun.
- •22) Noun determiners. The article. The problem of the zero article.
- •23. The verb as a part of speech. Grammatically relevant subclasses of verbs (transitive/intransitive, terminative/nonterminative).
- •24) Verbs of complete predication, link verbs, auxiliary verbs.
- •25) Syntagmatic properties of verbs.
- •26) Finite and non-finite forms of the verb. The category of finitude.
- •27) The verbal categories of person and number.
- •28) The category of tense in English. Tense oppositions. Absolute and relative tense meanings of English tense-forms.
- •29) The problem of perfect.
- •30) The category of aspect. Aspect opposition.
- •31) The category of voice. Voice opposition. The number of voices in English.
- •32) The category of mood. The problem of mood opposition. Mood and modality.
- •33) Function words in Modern English.
- •34) Syntax as a part of grammar. Kinds of syntactic theories.
- •35) Modern approaches to the language study: textlinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis.
- •36) Basic syntactic notions: syntactic units, syntactic relations, syntactic connections.
- •37) Coordination. The notion of parataxis.
- •38) Subordination. The notion of hypotaxis.
- •39) General characteristics of the word-group.
- •40) Nominal word combinations. Noun-phrases with pre-posed adjuncts.
- •41) Nominal word combinations. Noun-phrases with post-posed adjuncts.
- •42) Verbal word combinations. Types of verbal complements.
- •43) Predication. Primary and secondary predication. Predicative word combinations.
- •44) The sentence. Structural and semantic characteristics of the sentence. Different approaches to the study of the sentence.
- •45) Sentence - proposition - utterance - speech act.
- •46) The simple sentence. Principal, secondary and detached parts of the sentence.
- •47) The hierarchical structure of the sentence. Immediate Constituents analysis.
- •48) The paradigm of a simple sentence. Kernel and derived sentences. Syntactic processes.
- •49) The utterance. Informative structure of the utterance. The theme and the rheme.
- •50) The utterance. Communicative and pragmatic types of utterances.
- •51) The complex sentence as a polypredicative construction. Types of subordinate clauses.
- •52) Text as a syntactic unit. Coherence, cohesion and deixis as the main features of the text.
- •53) Textual connecting devices. Reiteration, collocation, endophoric relations.
- •54) The notion of deixis. Textual deictic markers.
- •55) Pragmatic approach to the study of language units.
- •56) Basic notions of pragmatic linguistics.
- •58) Classifications of speech acts.
- •59) Іndirect speech acts.
- •60) The study of language in use. Discourse analysis.
13) Oppositional analysis. Types of oppositions.
The oppositional method in syntax means correlating different sentence types: they possess common features and differential features. Differential features serve the basis for analysis. E.g. two member sentence :: one member sentence (John worked:: John! Work! Or: I speak English :: I don’t speak English. Three main qualitative types of oppositions were established in phonology: privative, gradual, and equipollent. By the number of members contrasted, oppositions were divided into binary and more than binary (ternary, quaternary, etc.). The binary privative opposition is formed by a contrastive pair of members in which one member is characterized by the presence of a certain differential feature (strong, marked, positive), while the other member is characterized by the absence of the feature (weak, unmarked, negative). Eg. Voiced vs. devoiced consonants. The gradual opposition is formed by a contrastive group of members which are distinguished not by the presence or absence of a feature, but by the degree of it. Generally speaking, Indo-European languages are classified into two structural types – synthetic and analytic. Synthetic languages are defined as ones of ‘internal’ grammar of the word – most of grammatical meanings and grammatical relations of words are expressed with the help of inflexions (Ukrainian - зроблю, Russian, Latin, etc). Analytical languages are those of ‘external’ grammar because most grammatical meanings and grammatical forms are expressed with the help of words.
14) Analytic and synthetic forms of English words. Analytic forms in the structure of English. (Блох, ст.32)
Here are two basic types of means with the help of which grammatical forms are built: synthetical and analytical. Synthetical (synthetic) grammatical forms are built by means of the morphemic composition of the word. This includes the morphemic means, which were described in the previous unit: outer inflexion with the help of adding grammatical suffixes to the stems of the words, e.g.: cat - cats; inner inflexion, or vowel interchange inside the root, e.g.: goose - geese; and suppletivity, when different roots are combined within the same paradigm, e.g.: go – went. Analytical grammatical forms are built by the combination of the notional word with auxiliary words, e.g.: come - have come. Analytical forms consist of two words which together express one grammatical meaning; in other words, they are grammatically idiomatic: the meaning of the grammatical form is not immediately dependent on the meanings of its parts. Analytical grammatical forms are intermediary between words and word-combinations. Some analytical forms are closer to a word, because the two parts are inseparable in their grammatical idiomatism; for example, the forms of the perfect aspect: come - have come. The components of some other analytical forms are more independent semantically, and they are less idiomatic grammatically; for example, the degrees of comparison: beautiful - more beautiful – most beautiful. Such combinations of an auxiliary component and a basic component are treated by some linguists as free word-combinations, but as they are correlative members of grammatical paradigms and express some specific grammatical meaning, they should be recognized as analytical grammatical forms too. Some lexical means regularly involved in the expression of common grammatical meanings can also be regarded as marginal cases of suppletivity or specific analytical forms, e.g.: the use of quantifiers with uncountable nouns or repetition groups – a bit of joy, the last two items of news, thousands and thousands, etc.
Analytical grammatical forms are prevalent in English; modern English is an analytical type of language.