Grammatical Semantics of Participle II

• It is closely associated with the verb (it has got the verbal stem; it is a component of 2 analytical verbal forms).

• It can be modified by an adverb (beautifully written).

• In certain lexical contexts it opposes Participle I in voice and aspect (writing – written, falling - fallen).

• It is unchangeable.

• Categorial meaning – some state of the object which is the result of the process.

 It is also called

- Past Participle (as opposed to Present Participle)

• e.g. Viewed from above the city seems beautiful.

• e.g. One day passed was already a day in the past.

• e.g. I don’t want to have it hung up.

- or Passive Participle (as opposed to Active Participle)

He wrote – it was written

written

• e.g. fallen leaves, the risen sun, a vanished land, past times, the newly arrived guests, a grown girl, escaped prisoners, the deceased lady, a collapsed lorry, an eloped pair, an expired lease, a deserted sailor, etc.

• e.g. She would sit watching the fallen leaves of last year, as she had watched the falling ashes at home.

Subjective or objective relations with Participle II can be identified only syntagmatically. Much depends on the verbal stem of Participle II. Objective relations are more recurrent and they express:

• A result of a completed action (the verb is terminative and transitive) e.g. He took a sheet of ruled paper covered with pencil notes.

• Consequence of an uncompleted action (the verb is non-terminative and transitive) e.g. He came in, escorted by Christine.

Subjective relations are expressed occasionally with a limited number of Participles, denoting a completed action (the verb is terminative and intransitive)

• e.g. Arrived at this point, we halted.

• e.g. Colonel Crashaw, retired.

 - or Perfect Participle (Prof.Smirnitskij): the action of the Participle is prior to the moment of speech or to another action.

• e.g. He found a letter, it was written by his father.

• e.g. It is made of steel.

Chapter 9. The sentence.

9.1. Sentence. General information.

In terms of meaning, the sentence is traditionally defined as the expression of a complete thought. The traditional definition is that a sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought is to-day often criticised on the ground that a sentence is sometimes one word and that the thought is not always complete but largely depends on the meaning of preceding sentences.

The sentence is sometimes viewed only as a speech event with no relevance to its grammatical organisation and distribution at all.

A simple sentence has its own system of formal means to express objective modal meanings and time relations concerning the reality or irreality of what is expressed in predication. The reflection of objective reality in a sentence is always clear of purpose.

The theory of the functional sentence perspective worked out by the Prague School of linguistics has led in recent times to the concept of three stages of syntactic abstraction where the sentence is viewed as: 1) a single speech event; 2) a syntactic structure made up of the syntactic elements with no relevance to situational contexts and belonging only to grammar; 3) an utterance in its functional sentence perspective.

There are different definitions of the sentence:

1) Logical: A sentence is a proposition expressed by words (something true). A proposition is the semantic invariant of all the members of modal and communicative paradigms of sentences and their transforms. But besides sentences which contain propositions there are interrogative and negative sentences. Speech is emotional. There is no one to one relationship. Then a sentence can be grammatically correct, but from the point of view of logic it won’t be correct, true to life (Water is a gas). Laws of thinking are universal but there are many languages. Grammar and Logic don’t coincide.

2) Structural: A sentence is a subject-predicate structure. What are the subject and the predicate? Grammatical subject can only be defined in terms of the sentence. Moreover the grammatical subject often does not indicate what we are ‘talking about’ (The birds have eaten all the fruit. It is getting cold). Besides, this definition leaves out verbless sentences. There are one-member sentences. They are non-sentences? Conclusion – a sentence is a structural scheme.

3) Phonological: A sentence is a flow of speech between 2 pauses. But speech is made up of incomplete, interrupted, unfinished, or even quite chaotic sentences. Speech is made up of utterances but utterances seldom correspond to sentences.

Thus, it is more preferable to describe a sentence than to define it. The main peculiar features of the sentence are:

• integrity

• syntactic independence

• grammatical completeness

• semantic completeness

• communicative completeness

• communicative functioning

• predicativity

• modality

• intonational completeness