- •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
Syntactic structure of the sentence as an object of linguistic studies
Principal and secondary parts of the sentence: sentence parsing
Members (parts) of the sentence as a syntactic unit are considered to be functions of the reflection of a situational event [Блох 2008: 293]. The parts of the sentence are subject, predicate, object, adverbial modifier, attribute, parenthesis, addressing enclosure. All these parts of the sentence are arranged in a certain hierarchical order revealing the basic logical-grammatical connections of the constituents of the sentence. Sentence parsing shows essential features of this hierarchy, with the subject and the predicate being the principal elements of the scheme and the rest performing secondary syntactic roles.
The drawback of this type of syntactic analysis is that it fails to present the linear order of the constituents of the sentence while exposing the subordination ranks of the parts of the sentence.
Immediate constituents of the sentence: ic analysis
To grasp the real structure of the English sentence, one must understand not only words that occur but also the principles of their arrangement. Each language has its own way of structural grouping. English has a dichotomous phrase structure, which means that the phrase in English can always be divided into two elements (constituents) until we get down to the ultimate word-level of the sentence. Thus, all groups of words are arranged in levels. The name given by linguists to this type of relationship is immediate constituents.
Thus, one way of analyzing a sentence is to cut it to its immediate constituents, that is, to single out different levels of meaning (see Lecture 1).
It is obvious that dividing a sentence into ICs does not provide much information. Nevertheless, it can sometimes prove useful if the ambiguity of certain constructions is accounted for. A classic example is the phrase old men and women which can be interpreted in two different ways. Ambiguity of this kind is referred to as syntactic ambiguity. By providing IC analysis we can make the two meanings clear:
E.g.: (old (men and women)) ÷ ((old men) and women)
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.
E.g.: two member sentence ÷ one member sentence (John worked ÷ John! Work!), affirmative sentence ÷ negative sentence (I speak English ÷ I don’t speak English.).
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. Therefore, the secondary parts of the sentence may be as salient and indispensable as the main ones. If we omit the object and the adverbial modifier in the following sentences they will become grammatically and semantically incomplete: Bill closed the door; She behaved well.
The structural sentence types are formed on the basis of kernel sentences (basic structures). There may be three main types of propositional kernels: N V, N is A, N is N. O.V. Alexandrova and T.A. Komova single out another set of main structural types in English
Subject + (transitive) verb + (direct) object (SVO)
Subject + (linking) verb + (subject) complement (SVC)
Subject + (intransitive) verb (SV) [Alexandrova, Komova 1998: 168].
However, if obligatory valency of the verbs is taken into account the group will become larger including up to 8 kernels.
E.g.: N1 V N2 N3: John gave Ann the book,
N1 V N2: I see a house.
Moreover, optional elements may be introduced into the main structural types. These are adverbials which main function is to specify information: e.g. This is a purely personal matter. Obviously, the best source of news is other people. Sometimes adverbials may become obligatory and form adverbial complements.
E.g. He is in the library at the moment.
Another element which may be introduced into the sentence structure is the indirect object.
The kernel sentences form the basis for syntactic derivation. Syntactic derivation is responsible for producing more complex sentences.
Syntactic processes may be internal and external. Internal syntactic processes involve no changes in the structure of the parts of the sentence. They occur within one and the same part of the sentence (subject, etc.). External syntactic processes are those that cause new relations within a syntactic unit and lead to appearance of a new part of the sentence.
The internal syntactic processes are:
Expansion: The phone was ringing and ringing.
Compression: They were laughing and singing.
Complication (a syntactic unit becomes complicated): I have seen it – I could have seen it .
Contamination (two parts of the sentence are joined together – e.g. double predicate): The moon rose red.
Replacement – the use of the words that have a generalized meaning: one, do, etc, I’d like to take this one.
Representation – a part of the syntactic unit represents the whole syntactic unit: Would you like to come along? I’d love to.
Ellipsis – Where are you going? To the movies.
The external syntactic processes are: