МИНИСТЕРСТВО ОБРАЗОВАНИЯ И НАУКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИ

Федеральное государственное бюджетное образовательное учреждение

высшего профессионального образования

«Брянский государственный университет

имени академика И.Г.Петровского»

Кафедра теории английского языка и переводоведения

Учебно-методическое пособие

Теоретическая грамматика английского языка

Курс лекций

Брянск 2014

Автор-составитель — доцент кафедры теории английского языка и переводоведения Антонова Татьяна Владимировна.

Теоретическая грамматика английского языка: Курс лекций: Учебно-методическое пособие. — Брянск.: РИО БГУ, 2014. — 63 с.

Учебно-методическое пособие предназначена для студентов направления 45.03.02 «Лингвистика», профиля подготовки «Перевод и переводоведение», изучающих дисциплину «Теоретическая грамматика английского языка»

Пособие знакомит студентов с основными понятиями Грамматики: категория, значение, форма, функция. Выявляется двойственная природа языковых знаков. Вводится понятие парадигматических и синтагматических отношений. Студенты познакомятся с языковыми уровнями и их основными единицами. В пособии представлены специфические особенности слова: (1) изолированность; (2) неразрывность или структурная целостность (непроницаемость); (3) подвижность в структуре предложения. Освещается проблема «zero»-морфемы. Вводится понятие теории оппозиций. Изучается проблема классификации слов. Исследуется существительное и его категории. Выделяются основные проблемы, связанные с артиклем. Внимание уделяется прилагательным, наречиям, глаголам и их основным категориям. В пособии изложена теория словосочетания и предложения.

Рецензенты:

Барынкина И.В.. — кандидат педагогических наук , доцент кафедры теории английского языка и переводоведения БГУ.

Селифонова Е. Д. — кандидат филологических наук, доцент кафедры теории английского языка и переводоведения БГУ.

Пособие одобрено и печатается по решению кафедры теории английского языка и переводоведения Брянского государственного университета имени академика И.Г. Петровского (29 августа 2014 г., протокол № 1).

Содержание

Grammar as a Constituent Part of Language System 5

The Conception of Language. Language and Speech 5

The Basic Grammar Notions: Category, Meaning, Form and Function 6

The Dualistic Nature of Language Units 7

The Notion of Syntagmatic and Paradigmatic Relations 8

Language Levels and Their Basic Units. 9

The Basic Units of Morphology. The Theory of Oppositions 11

The Word and its Basic Features 11

The Morpheme and the Morphemic Structure of the Word 12

The Theory of Oppositions 13

The Reduction of Oppositions 15

Lexico-Grammatical Classes of Words 15

The Problem of Classifying Words 15

The Traditional Classification of Words 16

Nouns 17

Adjectives 17

Notional and Functional Parts of Speech 17

The Field Structure of Parts of Speech 18

The Noun and Its Morphological Categories 19

The Category of Number 19

The Problem of the Category of Case 21

The Category of Gender 24

The Article as a Noun Determiner 25

Some Theoretical Problems of English Adjectives and Adverbs 29

The Category of Degrees of Comparison of Adjectives 29

The Syntactic Process of Substantivization of Adjectives 31

The “Stone Wall” Problem 32

The English Verb and Its Morphological Categories 34

The Morphological Field of the Verb 34

The Category of Tense 35

The category of Aspect 37

The Category of Retrospective Coordination (perfect) 38

The Category of Mood 40

The Category of Voice 43

Reflexive Voice 44

The Reciprocal Voice 46

The Middle Voice 46

The Phrase Theory 48

The Notion of the Phrase 48

Types of Syntactic Relations within a Phrase and Methods of Their Realization 48

Classification of Phrases 50

The Sentence Theory 51

Simple Sentence as the Basic Unit of Syntax. The definition of the Sentence 51

Classification of Sentences 51

The Composite Sentence 54

Actual Division of the Sentence. Text Formation Based on the Actual Division of the Sentence 56

The Syntactic and Semantic Structures of the Sentence in Correlation 58

An Elementary Sentence and Its Modification in Speech Acts 60

The Text 62

Glossary 66

Литература 70

Grammar as a Constituent Part of Language System The Conception of Language. Language and Speech

The dialectical conception of language states that language is a means of forming and storing ideas as reflections of reality and exchanging them in the process of human intercourse. Meaningful language units have their referents in reality which may be concrete objects, facts or relations between them or situations. Language is social by nature; it is inseparably connected with people, its creators and users. Language develops together with society. The system of language includes 3 principle parts: the phonological system, the lexical system and the grammatical system. All these 3 parts make up a unity without which no human language can exist.

The phonological system determines the material, or phonetic, appearance of language units. It is studied in phonology.

The lexical system includes the naming units of the language (words, word-combinations) and it is studied in lexicology.

The grammatical system deals with word-forms and rules for connecting them into phrases and sentences for the purpose of communication. It is studied in the science of grammar.

The problem of distinguishing between language and speech has arisen since the beginning of the 20^th century due to the words of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Language is treated as phonological, lexical and grammatical systems which lie at the base of everything pronounced or written. Thus, language is understood as a source of means to be used by the speaker in actual intercourse. As for speech, it is treated as the manifestation of language, its usage by speakers or writers. So what we hear or see before us in oral or written form is always a product of speech, something pronounced or written by somebody for somebody. There’s no other way of getting at a language than through its manifestation in speech. However it is wrong to strictly discriminate between them, because language and speech are closely interconnected and can’t exist without each other. The basic function of language is to serve a means of social intercourse, and the latter presupposes oral or written speech. True to say, for the sake of specific linguistic purposes we may discriminate between language and speech in order to study better some peculiarities of a language and its speech manifestations.

E.g. When we say that in English there exist phrases of the pattern N+N (stone wall) we characterize the language system. But pronouncing a concrete phrase of this pattern we manifest this quality of English in speech.

Grammar as a part of language macrosystem dynamically connects language as a system of signs with speech as the usage of signs and so it determines the lingual process of speech-making.

So the subject matter of the science of grammar as a linguistic discipline is to investigate and interpret language categories and functions which underlie the process of speech-making.

The Basic Grammar Notions: Category, Meaning, Form and Function

When dealing with the grammatical system of a language we should know the essence of its basic grammar notions.

By grammatical category we understand a general meaning according to which some word-forms are opposed or correlated. These word-forms make up a paradigm. No grammatical category can e recognized by only one word-form or without a paradigm. Thus, we speak of the grammatical category of number with English nouns because there exists an opposition of 2 word-forms with their opposed meanings of singularity and plurality (book – books).

The category of tense includes 4 opposed word-forms: present, past, future and future-in-the-past (write – wrote – will write – would write).

The grammatical meaning is understood as a general meaning of word-forms which are included into a grammatical category (the category of tense: present, past, future, future-in-the-past meanings). Or it may be understood as a generalized rather abstract meaning typical of all words making up a class or a group of structures based on one pattern. If we take nouns, the meaning is thingness; for verbs – actions or processes.

Grammatical meanings are expressed by a specific formal means or, when opposed, by their absence.

E.g. The grammatical meaning of plurality with English nouns is mostly expressed with the help of the inflection –s or –es, while the meaning of singularity is expressed by the absence of this inflection.

Formal means are specific for each language. Cf.: boys - мальчики - die Knaben.

Formal means render a certain grammatical meaning only when they are combined with words of some definite part of speech. Cf.: a table + s = tables (s expresses plurality)

to work + s = works (s expresses 3d person singular, present tense, active voice, indicative mood).

By the grammatical form we understand morphological characteristics of the given type or class of words or the structural properties of a phrase or sentence.

Formal morphological means are singled out within paradigmatic sets. Speaking of the grammatical form, the following morphological means can be employed to identify it:

1. inflections or grammatical suffixes which are added to the stem of the word: streets, approached;

2. sound alternation which consists in changing the root vowel: man – men;

3. suppletive forms which are derived from absolutely different stems: go – went, good – better, I – me;

4. analytical forms which include an auxiliary part and a notional part: has given, is working.

Analytical forms look like free word combinations but they must be differentiated. The following criteria may help to distinguish between analytical forms and free word combinations:

1. Each component of an analytical form doesn’t express the meaning of the whole form until all its components are joined together.

E.g. The word-forms has and given do not express the category of perfect until they are joined making up one unit has given.

2. The auxiliary part of an analytical form loses or nearly loses its lexical meaning and renders only grammatical meanings.

E.g. In the form has given the lexical meanings of both components are incompatible but as the auxiliary verb has loses its lexical meaning they are joined together and has expressed only grammatical meanings of the categories of tense, voice, mood, person and number.

3. There are no syntactic relations between the components of an analytical form. The analytical form is used as one member of the sentence. Consequently, the analytical form gets into syntactic relations with other members of the sentence as one unit. Components of an analytical form can’t have their individual syntactic relations.

E.g. has a book is a free word combination (a predicate + an object);

has read is an analytical form (it’s a predicate);

was driving a car is a free word combination which includes an analytical word-form.

We should also differentiate analytical verb-forms from bound word combinations like give up, take part, etc. The difference is that in the bound word combination neither of the components can be treated as auxiliary. Besides both components may have individual syntactic relations (take an active part). Moreover, one of the components of the bound phrase may be an analytical verb-form by itself (has given up).

By the grammatical function we mean syntactic properties of word-forms or communicative properties of sentences. The notion of function can be interpreted in 2 ways:

1. as combining power of the language unit, its valency – способность сочетаться;

2. as positional function or role of the unit in the sentence.

E.g. Nouns can combine with nouns, adjectives, numerals, pronouns, verbs. Syntactically nouns can fill in the positions of subject, object, attribute, predicative or an adverbial modifier of the sentence.