- •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)
12. Analytical forms, suppletivity, grammatical homonymy.
We distinguish 3 means of deriving word-forms in Modern English:
1) The synthetical way – that is the way of changing forms of the words by means of adding inflectional morphemes without any auxiliary words.
In the system of the English noun we distinguish the following inflectional morphemes: a) ‘es’, ‘s’, ‘en’ – expressing the idea of plurality. b) apostrophe ‘s’ – expressing the idea of possession
2) The analytical way is used for the formation of degrees of comparison of adjectives and adverbs (for example – interesting – more interesting – the most interesting; ’more’ and ‘the most’ are auxiliary words, ), continuous tense forms (I am reading, ‘am’ is an auxiliary word), perfect tense forms (I have done it, ‘have’ is an auxiliary word), future tenses (She will read this book, ‘will’ is an auxiliary word) and also passive voice (This story is written by Pushkin, ‘is’ is an auxiliary word).
3) Supplitive way implies the formation of words from different root morphemes. It’s found in the sphere of the English verbs – for example – to be-was/were – been. In the sphere of adjectives – good – better – the best, bad – worse – the worst.
14) Controversy in Parts of speech. Classification of parts of speech.
The classification of parts of speech is the controversial problem in general linguistics. There exist different classifications.
When the first English grammar appeared, the English grammarians borrowed from Latin the traditional classification of parts of speech. But it couldn’t be easily applied to modern English, because it was created for highly inflected languages, such as Greek and Latin, while English is highly analytical language, as there are not many inflections left in it.
George Curme distinguished nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. The drawback of his classification is that he didn’t include numerals and particles.
As for Henry Sweet, he distinguishes declinable classes of words (nouns, adjectives, numerals, verbs) and indeclinable, which are called particles (adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections). His classification is based on diclinability of words
Otto Jesperson names substantives (to which he refers: adjectives, verbs, nouns, pronouns, numerals and some adverbs) and particles, which include adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions and interjections. His classification is based on form, because he singles out particles.
Thus, we see that all English classical grammarians stick to the traditional number of parts of speech, but trying to give a more detailed description of the language, the had to subdivide classes into subclasses. Within the class of adverbs, they single out sentence- modifying adjectives, now we call them modal words (perhaps, certainly, surely, probably).
15) Charles Fries classification of words and its character
Charles Fries is representative of an American structural school of linguists. His classification of words may be taken as a good example of how the problem of parts of speech is treated by modern linguists abroad. They avoid grouping words into parts of speech; their terminology differs greatly from the traditional approach. In his book ‘the structure of English language’ Charles Fries gives a critical revision of the classical approach to the problem of parts of speech. So Charles Fries singled out the following classes of words: 1) Class N, denoting class 1 words, including all nouns and some pronouns. 2) Class B – words in which he put all verbs with the exception of auxiliary 3) Class A words – adjectives, pronouns and numerals. 4) Class D words – adverbs and some phrases. Functional words are unable to fit the position without destroying the structural meaning of sentences. He united functional words into 3 sets: 1) Determines of nouns – articles, some modal words, intensifiers of adjectives and adverbs (very, much, more). 2) Prepositions and conjunctions. 3) Question words (what, who), inducement words (let), attention getting words (listen! hear!), ‘yeas and no’ words and sentence introducers (it, there).
Charles Fries criticizes the traditional definitions, given to parts of speech but refrains from giving definitions of his own.