- •1) The theoretical course of grammar. Relationships between theoretical and normative grammar. Language and speech.
- •5) The transformational method and its application to the English grammar.
- •2) Grammar and phonetics. Grammar and lexicology.
- •3. Methods of grammatical investigation. The distributional method and its application to the English language
- •4) The method of Immediate Constituents and its application to the English language
- •7) Morphology and syntax. Their relationship and boundary lines between them
- •6) The notion of opposition in grammar (nouns, verbs, adjectives)
- •8) The notions of grammatical meaning and grammatical forms as applied to the English language.
- •9) Grammatical categories in Modern English
- •11. Types of word-form derivation in English. Inflectional morphemes, sound alternation, zero morpheme.
- •10) The basic morphological notions: word-morpheme, morph, allomorph.
- •12. Analytical forms, suppletivity, grammatical homonymy.
- •14) Controversy in Parts of speech. Classification of parts of speech.
- •15) Charles Fries classification of words and its character
- •16) The noun. Its definition, grammatical meaning, morphological characteristics, syntactical functions.
- •17) The noun. Its grammatical categories. Problem of gender in Modern English
- •18) The noun. The category of number and its peculiarities in the English noun. Singularia tantum and pluralia tantum.
- •19) The noun. The category of number and its peculiarities in the English noun. Collective nouns and nouns of multitude.
- •35. The Sentence. Classification of sentences according to their structure.
- •20) The noun. The category of case. Different approaches to the category of case in Modern English. Mutual relations of number and case.
- •40. The Predicate. Types of predicates. Simple and compound Nominal Predicates.
- •38. The main parts of the sentence. Their definition.
- •22) The verb. Its definition, grammatical meaning and morphological classification of verbs,
- •23) The verb. Semantic-syntactical classification of verbs.
- •29. The Verb. The category of Voice, its definition. Different views on the problem. Relationship of voice and transitivity and intransitivity of verbs.
- •37. The Sentence. Types of complex sentences and their structure.
- •24. The Verb. The problem of aspect. Definition of this category. English and Russian aspects compared.
- •30. The Verb. The category of Voice, its definition. Different views on the problem. The question of the reflexive voice.
- •28. The Verb. The category of Mood. Definition, different conceptions of the mood system in English and objective reasons for the existing controversy.
- •25. Controversy concerning the category of aspect. Assessments of different approaches to continious forms.
- •27. The verb. The perfect. Controversy concerning the essence of perfect forms. Assessments of different views on the problem. The category of time correlation.
- •26. The Verb. The category of tense, its definition. System of tenses in the English Verb.
- •41.The Predicate. Types of predicates. Compound Verbal Predicates. Mixed types.
- •31. The problem of the subject matter of Syntax. Basic syntactical notions. The phrase and the sentence.
- •39.The Subject. Types of the subject.
- •32. Syntax. The phrase definition, types of phrases.
- •36. The Sentence. Types of coordination within the compound sentence.
- •33. The Phrase. Ways of expressing syntactical relations within a phrase (agreement, government, adjoinment, enclosure)
31. The problem of the subject matter of Syntax. Basic syntactical notions. The phrase and the sentence.
The definition of the sentence still remains one of the most difficult problems of general linguistics. It remains unsolved up to this date. Professor Ilyish avoids giving the definition of the sentence, he gives the following characteristic futures of the sentence: 1) It must state the relation of the sentence as a unit of language to the thought. 2) It must take into account the specific structure of the language. 3) It must leave room, as for many variants as it’s possible, Though the definition of the sentence has a long system, it still remains one of the most debatable theoretical problems and it still remains unsolved to this day.
But syntax deals not only with the sentence, but also with the word group, the word combination or the phrase. What is the difference between the sentence and the phrase? To answer this question professor Smirnitsky compares 2 word combinations: ‘The doctor’s arrival’ and ‘the doctor arrived’. The 1st word combination doesn’t communicate anything. It’s not a unit of communication. In the 2nd word combination the same phenomenon of objective reality is represented as connected with reality. The indication of the connection of our communication with reality is called predication. Thus, predication expresses the reference of the contents of speech to reality. Therefore, the sentence is the shortest unit of communication , which is characterized by predication, modality, relative completeness of its meaning and intonation.
The phrase or word group is a grammatically organized unit of speech, consisting of 2 or more words, denoting a certain notion.
39.The Subject. Types of the subject.
The subject is the independent part of sentence, denoting a thing, whose action or character is expressed by the predicate. The subject can be personal and impersonal. In the classification of Professor Smirnitsky there are 5 classes of personal subject^ 1) The personal subject proper (for ex. ‘The students are writing now’). this type of subject may be expressed by the noun or pronoun. 2) Indefinite personal subject – It denotes a person but in a very general sense, for ex - ‘when you have a fever you should stay at home’. It can be expressed by the pronouns we, you they, he. 3) the demonstrative subject - for example – ‘that is a window’; ‘this is my book’. 4) negative subject – expressed by the negative pronoun nobody, nothing. For example, No one has spoken to her. 5) The interrogative subject – it occurs in interrogative sentences – ‘what has happened’; ‘who has done it?’
The impersonal subject neither denotes nor points a definite thing. It’s usually expressed by the pronoun ‘it’, ‘It’s frosty today’. ‘It’s wonderful to speak English well’.
32. Syntax. The phrase definition, types of phrases.
The term phrase was 1st used to denote a word group in the 18th century. This term was again accepted in the 19th century by the grammarians but then it was again rejected by several scholars. Henry Sweet rejected this term, because of its popular meaning, in stead of it he used the term ‘a word group’. Otto Jesperson doesn’t use any special term to denote this syntactic unit. As for American structural linguists they recognize and widely use the term ‘phrase’. The phrase of a words group is a grammatically organized unit of speech, consisting of 2 or more words, denoting a certain notion. We distinguish word combinations of 2 kinds: Coordinate combinations and subordinate combinations. In coordinate combinations grammatically equal words are combined with the help of form words, that is coordinate conjunctions, such as ‘and’ and ‘but’ and also by word order and intonation, that is asyndetic coordination. For example, ‘a cat and a dog’ – coordinate conjunctions, ‘cats, dogs, pigs’ – asyndetic coordination. The phrase only designates the phenomenon of objective reality, it’s not a unit of communication and it doesn’t have the intonation of its own. Within the phrase words are connected in different ways: in subordinate word combinations there is a word which is dominating over another word or words which are called adjuncts. Syntactical relations in subordinate word combinations can be of several types. The main types are agreement, government, adjoinment and enclosure.