- •Theoretical grammar as a subject, its aim. Language as a functional system. Language and speech.
- •Types of meaning. Language levels and linguistic units.
- •The difference between system and structure.
- •Systematic relations in a language. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations.
- •Structural types of languages. English as an analytical language.
- •Morphology and syntax as two parts of linguistic description.
- •Grammatical meaning: explicit/implicit, general/dependent.
- •Grammatical category as unity of meaning. The notion of opposition.
- •Analytical and synthetic formations.
- •Types of morphemes.
- •The problems of definition and classification of parts of speech.
- •Grammatical homonymy.
- •Functional and notional parts of speech. Functional parts of speech. Preposition
- •Conjunctions
- •Particles
- •Interjection
- •General characteristics of the noun. Types of nouns.
- •Grammatical categories of nouns.
- •General characteristics of the adjective. Structural types of adjectives. The category of degrees of comparison.
- •The stative; its syntactical functions. The stative
- •Syntactic function
- •Substantivization (substantivation) of adjectives and adjectivization of nouns.
- •General characteristics of the adverb. Semantic types of adverbs. The category of degrees of comparison.
- •General characteristics of the pronoun. Types of pronouns. Grammatical categories of pronouns.
- •The numeral: meaning, form and function.
- •The verb, its meaning, form and function. Finite and non-finite verbs.
- •Structural types and morphological classes of verbs.
- •Modal verbs.
- •The categories of tense, aspect and phase (time-correlation).
- •The preposition, its types.
- •The conjunction, its types.
- •The particle and the interjection as parts of speech.
- •Subject of syntax.
- •Types of syntactic connection.
- •Word combinations, their types.
- •The notion of predication. Predication and modality
- •The sentence, its structure.
- •Main parts of sentence and their types.
- •Secondary parts of sentence and their types.
- •Prepositional and non-prepositional objects
- •The Apposition, Direct Address, Parentheses, and Insertions. Loose Parts.
- •Loose parts of sentence
- •Communicative types of sentences.
- •Structural types of sentences.
- •I‘m happy.
- •I‘m happy, but my kids are always complaining.
- •I’m happy, even though I don’t make much money.
- •I’m happy, even though I don’t make much money, but my kids are always complaining since we can’t afford to buy the newest toys.
- •Ellyptical sentences and one-member sentences.
- •Verbless two-member sentences and idiomatic sentences.
- •The composite sentence. Compound sentences.
- •The complex sentence, its structure and type of connection between clauses.
- •Types of clauses.
- •Independent clauses
- •Dependent clauses
- •Main or Independent Clause
- •Subordinate or dependent Clause
- •Noun Clause
- •Adjective Clause
- •Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Clauses
- •Adverb Clause
- •Types of adverbial clauses.
- •Word order and inversion.
- •Interrogative Sentences
- •Imperative Sentences
The notion of predication. Predication and modality
The communicational frame of the sentence includes its propositional content, the cognitive content of the utterance. The proposition is the reflection of a state-of affairs and consists of reference and predication. Reference is the denotation of a thing, person or idea, predication assigns a property or relation to the denoted thing, person or idea.
Therefore, propositional content may be described as references to things, persons, ideas and their predication in terms of properties of, and relations between them in objective reality:
Propositional content
Reference predication reference
To thing, person,idea of property,relation tothing,person,idea
(propositional roles) (propositional predicate) (propositional roles)
property Somebody is something
relation Somebody does something
Predication means that the sentence not only names some referents with the help of its word-constituents, but also, first, presents these referents as making up a certain situation, or, more specifically, a situational event, and second, reflects the connection between the nominal denotation of the event, on the one hand, and the objective reality, on the other, showing the time of the event, its being real or unreal, desirable or undesirable, necessary or unnecessary.
I am satisfied, the experiment has succeeded.
I would have been satisfied if the experiment had succeeded.
The experiment seems to have succeeded – why then am I not satisfied?
Night. Night and the boundless sea, under the eternal star-eyes shining with promise. Was it a dream of freedom coming true?
Night? Oh no. No night for me until I have worked through the case.
Night. It pays all the day’s debts. No cause for worry now, I tell you.
Whereas the utterance “night” in the first of the given passages refers the event to the plane of reminiscences, the “night” of the second passage presents a question in argument connected with the situation wherein the interlocutors are immediately involved, while the latter passage features its “night” in the form of a proposition of reason.
The sentence, its structure.
The sentence.
It is rather difficult to define the sentence as it is connected with many lingual and extra lingual aspects – logical, psychological and philosophical. We will just stick to one of them - according to academician G.Pocheptsov, the sentence is the central syntactic construction used as the minimal communicative unit that has its primary predication, actualises a definite structural scheme and possesses definite intonation characteristics. This definition works only in case we do not take into account the difference between the sentence and the utterance. The distinction between the sentence and the utterance is of fundamental importance because the sentence is an abstract theoretical entity defined within the theory of grammar while the utterance is the actual use of the sentence. In other words, the sentence is a unit of language while the utterance is a unit of speech.
The Sentence: general. The sentence is the immediate integral unit of speech built up of words according to a definite syntactic pattern and distinguished by a contextually relevant communicative purpose. the sentence is the main object of syntax as part of the grammatical theory.While the word is a component element of the word-stock and as such is a nominative unit of language, the sentence, linguistically, is a predicative utterance-unit. Intonation separates one sentence from another in the continual flow of uttered segments and, together with various segmental means of expression, participates in rendering essential communicative-predicative meanings (such as, for instance, the syntactic meaning of interrogation in distinction to the meaning of declaration). the sentence is characterised by its specific category of predication which establishes the relation of the named phenomena to actual life. The general semantic category of modality is also defined by linguists as exposing the connection between the named objects and surrounding reality. As for predication proper, it embodies not any kind of modality, but only syntactic modality as the fundamental distinguishing feature of the sentence. The centre of predication in a sentence of verbal type (which is the predominant type of sentence-structure in English) is a finite verb. The nominative meaning of the syntagmatically complete average sentence (an ordinary proposemic nomination) reflects a processual situation or event that includes a certain process (actional or statal) as its dynamic centre, the agent of the process, the objects of the process, and also the various conditions and circumstances of the realisation of the process. Different approaches to the study of the sentence.Principal and secondary parts of the sentence.Immediate constituents of the sentence. IC analysisEach language has its own way of structural grouping. English has dichotomous phrase structure, which means that the phrase in English can always be divided into two elements (constituents) until we get down to the single word. All groups of words are arranged in levels. The name given by linguists to these different levels of relationship is immediate constituents.Oppositional analysis.The oppositional method in syntax means correlating different sentence types: they possess common features and differential features. Differential features serve the basis for analysis.Constructional analysis.According to the constructional approach, not only the subject and the predicate but also all the necessary constituents of primary predication constitute the main parts because they are constructionally significant.