- •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)
3. Methods of grammatical investigation. The distributional method and its application to the English language
To the main methods studying grammar we refer the distributional method, the method of immediate constituents and the transformational method. These methods have been worked out and introduced by the modern American structural linguist.
Distribution of an element is the sum of all environments in which it occurs. It’s the sum of all the different positions of an element. By applying the distributional method the Modern American linguist Charles Fries who rejected the traditional classification of parts of speech, worked out his own system of different classes of words.
A distributional class, according to Charles Fries, is a class of elements that occur in the same position. His method helps to distinguish different classes of linguistic elements. For example, ‘the book is interesting’ – “book’ is the 1st class, “is” – the 2nd class, ‘interesting’ – the 3rd class
4) The method of Immediate Constituents and its application to the English language
The method of Immediate Constituents helps to arrive at a complete structural meaning of a sentence. It shows us how the sentence is built up. In order to analyze the complete structural meaning of a sentence we must determine how the separate units of the sentence are grouped.
Charles Fries introduces in the analysis of a sentence the idea of a phrase, consisting of the 2 immediate constituents.
An immediate constituent is one of the 2 constituents of which the given linguistic form is directly built-up. The division of a construction begins with the longest elements and continues to the smallest. For example – ‘The girl hit the table’. This sentence consists of the noun group (the girl) and the verb group (hit the table). The noun group consists of the article (the) and the noun (girl). The verb group consists of the verb (hit) and the noun group, which consists of the article (the) and the noun (table). It’s called a derivational tree. The derivational tree shows how the sentence is generated from its constituents. The theory of immediate constituents is fit for generating sentences.
This is an exact theory, but the sphere of its application is limited to generating only kernel (simple) sentences.
The 2nd demerit is the following; the Immediate constituents model can not be used for the analysis of syntactical homonyms. That is structures of the same type, which greatly differ from each other in meaning. For example, ‘Monika is difficult to speak’ and ‘Monika is eager to speak’. A sentence consists of noun group and the verb group. The verb group consists of verb and adjective group. Adjective group consists of adjective and infinitive. The derivational tree shows that these sentences have the same structure, but the sentences are quite different in meaning. In the 1st sentence Monika is the object of the action, while in the 2nd sentence ‘Monika’ is the subject.
7) Morphology and syntax. Their relationship and boundary lines between them
Grammar is a science, dealing with the grammatical structure of a language as a system. The grammatical structure of a language is a sum of regularities which defines inflections of words and the combination of words in sentences. Thus, grammar consists of 2 parts: morphology and syntax. They are very closely connected with each other, but each of them has an object of its own.
Morphology is the part of grammar which deals with the form of the words, classification of words and their combinability.
Syntax studies 2 levels – phrases on the one hand and sentences on the other, secondly their classification and their combinability. It’s difficult to draw a clear-cut line between 2 parts of grammar.