- •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)
19) The noun. The category of number and its peculiarities in the English noun. Collective nouns and nouns of multitude.
The singular number shows that one object is meant and the plural shows that more than one object is meant. But the category of number gives rise to several problems which claim special attention. In such cases as ‘waters’ and ‘snows’ we drift away from the original meaning of the plural number. No numeral could be used with nouns of this kind. We can’t say ‘three waters’ or ‘2 snows’, moreover we can’t say how many waters or snows we mean. The plural form of these words serves to denote a vast stretch of water (for example – waters of the ocean) or of snow (snows of the Canada).
Plural form can sometimes develop a completely new meaning which the singular hasn’t got at all. For example – people (люди) – peoples (народы); custom (обычай) – customs (таможня); color (цвет) – colors (знамя); attention (внимание) – attentions (ухаживания).
Certain nouns, denoting groups of human beings (family, government, party, army) and also of animals (cattle, poultry) can be used in 2 different ways:
1)Either they denote the group as a whole than they are treated as singular and are called collective nouns
2) Either they denote the group as consisting of a certain number of individual human beings. Then they are called nouns of multitude.
For example, ‘My family is small’ – it’s a collective noun; ‘My family are good speakers’ – the noun of multitude.
‘The cattle were grazing in the field’ – the noun of multitude ; ‘My cattle is in the shed’ – collective noun.
35. The Sentence. Classification of sentences according to their structure.
Sentences can be simple and composite. Simple sentences can be extended and unextended. Unextended sentence consists of the subject and predicate only, for example ‘He is sleeping’. Extended sentences have some other parts, for example ‘He is sleeping on the sofa ’. Also simple sentences can be two member and one member sentences. Two member sentences can be complete (for example, “where are you going?”) and elliptical (“Home”). One member sentences can be nominal (‘Summer. Night. Music’), imperative (‘Speak up!’) and infinitival (‘to do such a thing!’).
Composite sentences can be compound and complex. In compound sentences 2 or more equal sentences are joined together with the help of coordinate conjunctions ‘and’, ‘but’. For example, ‘It was the beginning of July and the weather was fine’. Complex sentences contain the principle clause and several subordinate clauses. For example, ‘I don’t know where he was gone’.
20) The noun. The category of case. Different approaches to the category of case in Modern English. Mutual relations of number and case.
The problem of case is one of the most debatable problems in English grammar. The usual view is that the English nouns have 2 cases – a common and possessive (or genitive), for example – mother – mother’s. But there are other views which are contradictory to each other.
The 1st is that the number of cases is more that 2. The 2nd is that there are no cases at all on the sphere of English nouns.
Case is the category of a noun, expressing relations between the thing denoting by a noun and other things or properties or actions and manifested by some formal sign in the noun itself.
This sign is almost always an inflection and it may be a zero sign: the absence of any sign may be significant in distinguishing one particular case from another. The minimum number of cases in a give language system must be 2 because the existence of 2 correlated elements is needed to establish a category.
German linguists proposed that the case may be expressed by different prepositions, by word order they distinguish 4 cases – nominative, genitive, dative (by preposition ‘to’ and word order) and accusative. This point of view isn’t right, because if we admit that the phrase ‘of the pan’ is genitive case, ‘to the pan’ is dative, then there would be no reason to deny that ‘with the pan’ is an instrumental case, ‘in the pan’ is the locative case.
Thus, the number of cases would become indefinitely large, because there are a lot of prepositions in English.
It seems obvious that the number of cases can’t be more than 2 - common and possessive.
The possibility of forming possessive case is limited to a class of nouns, denoting living beings (my brother’s wife) and those, denoting units of time (this year’s election) and also substantivized adverbs (today’s newspaper).