- •С.В. Иванова
- •Ббк 81.2 Англ
- •Foreword
- •Preface
- •Preface to the second edition
- •Major trends in Theoretical Grammar of the English language
- •Classical English grammar
- •Transformational grammar
- •Functional Communicative Approach
- •Cognitive Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics
- •Supplementary literature:
- •2. Major grammatical notions
- •Language as a system
- •Chart 1. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations
- •Chart 2. Paradigmatic patterns of a clause by m.A.K. Halliday
- •Interrogative→ “wh”
- •Indicative→ declarative→
- •Imperative → jussive38 →
- •Inclusive
- •Grammatical meaning, grammatical form and grammatical category
- •E.G. Work –worked
- •The notion of opposition in Theoretical Grammar
- •Synthetic and analytic forms
- •Morphology and Syntax as two main parts of grammar
- •Chart 3. The scope of morphology
- •Inflection word-formation
- •3. The notion of a morpheme
- •The idea and the definition of the morpheme
- •Types of morphemes
- •Problems connected with the notion of a morpheme
- •Characteristic features of inflectional morphology and types of word-form derivation
- •4. The parts of speech system
- •In foreign linguistics
- •Introduction to the problem
- •Classification of parts of speech suggested by Henry Sweet
- •3. O. Jespersen’s classification of parts of speech
- •4. Principles of the classification of words suggested by Charles Fries
- •Woggles ugged diggles
- •Uggs woggled digs
- •5. Classifications of parts of speech developed within structuralist linguistics
- •6. R. Quirk’s approach to the problem in his
- •Verb Preposition
- •Interjection
- •Modern grammars of contemporary English
- •5. The parts of speech system
- •In russian linguistics
- •The main criteria for the classification of parts of speech in Russian Linguistics
- •The concept of notional and formal words
- •6. The article
- •1. The status of the article in English
- •2. The number of articles in English
- •3. The categorial meaning and the functions of the article
- •7. Noun and its grammatical categories
- •Introduction. The categories of gender and number
- •The category of case
- •The syntactic function of the noun
- •8. The verb. General characteristics
- •The verb. General overview
- •2. The categories of person and number
- •3. The category of tense
- •9. The category of aspect
- •In modern english
- •The definition of aspect as a verbal category
- •Different approaches to the interpretation of aspect
- •The connection of the aspect interpretation with other lexicological issues: terminative and durative verbs
- •The correlation of the English aspect forms and Russian aspect forms
- •10. The category of retrospective coordination
- •The problem of the Perfect forms in the system of the English language
- •2. Different approaches to the interpretation of perfect forms
- •Interpretation of perfect forms as an independent grammatical category
- •11. The category of mood in modern english
- •1. The category of mood and its semantic content
- •Debatable issues connected with the interpretation of the category of mood
- •12. The category of voice
- •In modern english
- •The nature of the grammatical category of voice
- •2. Debatable problems within the category of voice
- •He told me a story.
- •3. The notion of transitivity
- •13. Syntax
- •Syntax as a branch of grammar
- •Units of syntactic description
- •The theory of phrase
- •Types of syntactic relations (linkage)
- •14. The sentence
- •The sentence: the problem of its definition
- •2. The sentence. Its major categories
- •3. Typology of the sentence
- •15. Sentence as an object of syntactic studies
- •Major features of the sentence as a syntactic unit
- •Syntactic structure of the sentence as an object of linguistic studies
- •Immediate constituents of the sentence: ic analysis
- •Adjoinment - the use of specifying words, most often particles: He did it – Only he did it.
- •The utterance. Informative structure of the utterance
- •Basic notions of pragmatic linguistics
- •Speech act theory. Direct and indirect speech acts. Types of speech acts
- •Discourse analysis as the study of language in use
- •Implicatures of discourse
- •Implicatures and indirectness
- •It is only due to making an assumption about the relevance of b’s response that we can understand it as an answer to a’s question.
- •A List of Selected Bibliography
- •List of reference and practice books
- •Terminological dictionaries
- •Seminars in theoretical grammar
- •Contents
2. The number of articles in English
Provided the article is ascribed the part of speech status, linguists face the problem of the number of articles in English. This question can have three answers in theoretical English grammar.
According to the first approach there are two articles in English: the definite (the) and the indefinite (a/ an) as there are two material manifestations of the article system in English. But linguists paid attention to those cases when the article can be omitted and this absence of the article is meaningful.
Cf.: English is a Germanic language.
The language of this writer is very complicated.
Language is a means of communication.
Hence, we can state that there are three possible variants: (1) a language, (2) the language, (3) language. Now the question arises, how this third variant should be treated. The older grammatical tradition described it as “omission of the article”, which is obviously inadequate, since there is not the slightest reason to believe that the article in such cases was ever “omitted”.
Another view is that this case should be described as “the absence of the article”, and sometimes this notion is made more precise and the phenomenon is called “meaningful absence of the article”. According to practical grammars of English the omission of the article here has the generic function. This enables linguists to arrive at the conclusion that the meaningful absence of the article is an article in itself. That makes the number of articles in English equal to three.
Thus the very absence of the article is a special kind of article. And it is called the “zero article”. According to this view, then, there would be three articles in English: the definite, the indefinite and the zero article. This idea of the zero article takes its origin in the notion of a zero morpheme, which has been applied to certain forms, namely, those having no ending, and in this way differing from other forms of the same word (cf. in Russian: руки – рук). The notion of the zero-morpheme can also be applied in English. If, therefore, we were to interpret the article as a morpheme, the idea of a zero-article would present no difficulty. But since the conclusion was made that an article is a separate word, we would be supposed to speak of a zero-word, i.e. a word having no material exponent, which makes no sense and contradicts the basic principles of materialistic approach to the analysis of language. Indeed, ‘zero-words” can hardly be analyzed because that would mean that we are analyzing nothing. That does not sound convincing.
Prof. M.Y. Blokh suggests a compromise of an approach. He thinks that the article paradigm, which presents the category of article determination, consists of three grammatical forms: the definite, the indefinite and the zero form. The paradigm demonstrates asymmetry connected with various cases like singularia tantum, pluralia tantum: Ø progress – a kind of progress, some progress – the progress, Ø news – an item of news – the news, etc. The first opposition is between the definite article and either the indefinite or zero form. The non-marked member is then divided into relative generalization (the indefinite form and zero form) and absolute generalization (zero-form). Thus, the article is built into the nounal system, which besides the categories of number and case, distinguishes also the category of determination Блох 1983: 82-85.
The next approach to the article is the acknowledgement of four articles – the definite, the indefinite, zero and partitive. According to this theory there also exists a partitive article in English which is represented by the pronoun some. This theory has a lot of opponents who give the following arguments against the recognition of the partitive article. The pronoun some even in such word-combinations as some bread is an element of a pronoun system, it only acquired some special use in speech. The pronoun some cannot be regarded as an article because it has its own meaning. Word combinations of the type some bread and the like illustrate the use of notional parts of speech in the function of form words.
Nowadays the most convincing theory as far as the number of articles is concerned is the theory of the two articles (L.S. Barkhudarov, I.P. Ivanova, V.D. Arakin, B.S. Khaimovich & B.J. Rogovskaya) – the definite article and the indefinite article – that represent a certain class of form words. Nevertheless, the idea of a zero article has its staunch proponents and is also made use of, for example, it is employed in Cambridge Grammar of English (2007).