Теоретическая грамматика английского языка. Учебно-методическое пособие

Seminar Class

1.Define the grammatical category of mood and point out its specific character in the system of verbal categories. Point out and discuss the main problems that arise in the study of this category and the classification of moods in English. Substantiate your point of view on the number of moods in English.

2.Characterize the system of moods in English from the following aspects: form, meaning and contexts of use.

3.Compare the systems of moods in English and Russian and point out the main difficulties in the use of oblique moods which may arise for Russian learners of English.

4.Point out the specific character of the category of voice as compared to the other verbal categories. Enumerate different approaches to the study of voice of English. Characterize the essence of the category of voice in terms of the diathesis.

5.Analyze the opposition Active: Passive in English. Characterize the relations between transitivity and the ability of the verb to passivize. Point out the specific features of English in the sphere of voice.

6.Point out and analyze the semantic, pragmatic and syntactic factors which determine the use of the Passive voice in English.

7.Enumerate and characterize other means of expressing voicelike distinctions in English.

Exercises

I. State the form of the mood and its meaning in the following sentences:

1. If it wasn’t for my pipes I don’t know how I should manage to keep on (E. Waugh).

2. It would be worse than before if I should lose you now (G. Greene).

3.Some of these stories, it is understood, are not to be passed on to my father, because they would upset him (M.Atwood).

4.She had suggested that Abraham arrive precisely at one-thirty (I. Stone).

5.If such men would only rule the world, I should have no conflicts to write about (J. le Carre).

6.“So you went to catch a thief alone? What if there had been more than one? (L.S. Robinson).

7.I went back to the room and thought,” I might as well have told them both that I was going.”...My lie would even ease his conscience (G. Greene).

8.“I lied to you, Phuong. I have been ordered home” “But you won’t go?” “If I refused what would we live on?” “I could come with you. I would like to see London” (G. Greene).

9. I wished she would not always treat me as a child (D. du Maurier).

10.No doubt life had many strange secrets. Perhaps it was essential that somebody should investigate them (Th. Dreiser).

11.He insisted that the boy remain in bed (A.J. Cronin).

II. Analyze the sentences and differentiate between the grammatical homonyms - the forms of the Passive voice and the compound nominal predicate.

1.The piano is not tuned. The piano has not been tuned for years.

2.He came up to the door to discover it was locked. After they set off the doors and the windows were locked.

3.She went round the house to see if everything was prepared for the ball. The house was being prepared for the ball.

4.“How do you find the cooking? ‘“Unchanged. When the cook was hired, your aunt gave her ten menus and they have never varied since”.

5.The dinner was announced and they were invited to the dining

room.

6.The house was large and beautifully furnished.

7.They are made from real sapphires which were brought from India many years ago.

III. Analyze the sentences and point out the factors that necessitated the use of the passive voice.

1.Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched.

2.His wife was found in the grounds nearly half a mile from the house... No weapon was found near her. The crime seems to have been

committed late in the evening and the body was found by a gate keeper about 11 o’clock (A. Conan Doyle).

3.Many sentences were pronounced in that darkened room and the prisoners often needed cheering (R. Kipling).

4.Hungry people are easily led (K.Mansfield).

5.It is to be hoped that the President will respond to this in a positive way.

6.When it became known that he had made reservations for the entire Festival this year many eyebrows were raised (I. Shaw).

7.Many attempts have been made to find central or basic meanings

for each modal that can explain their common and effortless use (F. Catamba).

8.The public was being lied to and knew it (D. Bolinger).

9.He was accompanied to the house by his wife, his son, his daughter and his servants.

10.Such a behavior is not accepted in our company.

IV. Translate the sentences into English and compare the use of voice forms in English and in Russian.

1.На день рождения ей подарили чудное ожерелье из жемчуга.

2.Вас обслуживают?

3.В этом доме уже много лет никто не живет.

4.Заседание посетил Генеральный секретарь ООН.

5.О его последней работе очень хорошо отзываются.

6.У вас хорошее пианино, но его нужно настроить.

7.После двух лет работы в компании его повысили в должности.

8.Как только он вышел из здания театра, его окружили многочисленные репортеры.

Though the adjective is traditionally referred to as one of the four cardinal parts of speech, which represents the static, or permanent property of substance. Considered from the point of view of their communicative function the adjective and the verb constitute a class of the so called predicative words which are opposed to the so called identifying words (pronouns, proper names and common nouns which are by-functional and can function as both identifying and predicative words). The communicative, or discoursive function of the identifying words is to name substance represented by various objects and phenomena of the world and also name objects of our inner world whereas the discoursive fumction of the predicative words is to name properties that we attribute to substance and the objects of our inner world which is performed in the act of predication.

On the other hand the adjective dispays proximity to the class of nouns too. Adjectives are close to nouns genetically because in most languages adjectives as a class of words presents a later formation. The emergence of adjectives became possible when the human mind developed the ability to conceptualize quality separately from substance and present it as a separate word.

Adjectives in English constitute rather a large class of words and include both simple and derivative units. The number of simple adjectives is quite limited. The majority of adjectival lexemes are derivatives which means that they have distinct part-of-speech markers.

The class of adjectives is composed of two unequal subclasses: qualitative and relative adjectives. Qualitative adjectives denote various qualities of substance which are gradable. Relative adjectives denote properties related to some substance. The relational semantics of this subclass of adjectives comes out very clearly in the analysis of their definitions, e.g. wooden – made of wood, historical – belonging to history etc. Relative adjectives denote ungradable property and they do not combine with intensifiers and do not have degrees of comparison.

The class of adjectives has a distinct prototypical structure. The center of the class is taken up by the units of pure categorial semantics which reveal parallelism, or symmetry of their semantic, morphological and syntactic properties. Relative adjectives occupy the near periphery: they denote permanent relational property and they are bifunctional but as they denote relational property (substantive relations) therefore are not gradable (they lack degrees of comparison).

The periphery adjacent to the class of verbs is taken up by several subclasses of adjectives which occupy the periphery at a different distance from the center. These adjectives are characterized by the syncretism of their categorial semantics, they combine adjectival features with verbal. The subclass of adjectives which is closest to the verb are the so called statives (awake, asleep, afoot, afraid, ablaze, glad, ill, sorry etc.). They differ from the prototypical adjectives semantically as they denote not permanent qualities but temporary states which brings them very close to the verbs. Another large subclass of peripheral adjectives comprises adjectives derived from the verb with the help of the suffix -able/ible (there are also adjectives that are derived from nouns, e.g. knowledgeable). As the result of their derivation from the verbs these adjectives retain some of the verbal properties and their categorial semantics is syncretic as it combines both verbal and adjectival features. There are several more subclasses of peripheral adjectives which may become semantically and functionally close to verbs in certain contextual conditions. Among them are the adjectival lexemes which denote a temporary quality, e.g. reluctant, nervous etc.

The functional interaction of the adjectives with nouns is manifested in the process traditionally called substantivization of adjectives. In fact the term substantivization covers three different processes which coincide in their final result, i.e. the homonymy of the mother and daughter lexemes (the deriving and the derived lexemes). Nouns derived by adjectives by means of conversion (zero derivation) are characterized by a symmetry of morphological and syntactic properties. They have all the features of nouns. Far more numerous are the cases when adjectives come to function as nouns as the result of a noun deletion from a nominal phrases which becomes possible when the meaning of the deleted noun is implicit in the

adjectives, e.g. a musical play – a musical. The deleted noun can be easily restored which is impossible in the case of nouns formed from adjectives by means of conversion.

The third and the most regular process of interaction between adjectives and nouns manifests itself in the use of adjectives in the syntactic position of nouns. The transposed adjectives are characterized by the asymmetry of their categorial features as they possess both the adjectival and the nominal features. Like nouns they take the definite article and denote either a group of people (the rich, the poor etc.), they are used in the positions of the subject, object and predicative and may be modified by an attribute (the idle rich, the filthy rich). At the same time they retain some adjectival features: they have degrees of comparison. Also like adjectives they may be modified by adverbs of degree.

The semantics of the adjectives transposed into the syntactic positions of nouns also undergoes certain modification: they denote not a quality but a group of people of things united together on the basis of a certain quality and thus they become functional synonyms of two subclasses of nouns: collective nouns and abstract nouns. This function of generalization is carried out by the definite article.

These class of adjectives and the class of adverbs are also related to each other onomasiologically and derivationally. Both denote property, property of substance and property of action correspondingly. They are related derivationally as most of the qualitative adverbs are derived from adjectives. The two classes may also interact with each other functionally, by exchanging syntactic functions. Sometimes we come across the use of adjectives in an adverbial position, e.g. Her mother dresses her nice; Don’t speak so loud and though the adverbial meaning of such units is made absolutely transparent by their syntactic position, such cases are limited to some dialects.

Far more frequent are the cases when the two classes come closer to each other by means of the exchange of semantic functions. This type of interaction may be called indirect because it happens as the consequence of the interaction between the other parts of speech, namely nouns and verbs. In these two sentences the adjectives

continuing and serious are components of noun phrases and formally they are attributes to these nouns.

Another cases of such indirect functional interaction is observed in the so called transferred parts of the sentence e.g. We drank the hock and smacked appreciative lips. In such sentences the adjectives are formally attributes to nouns, but semantically they characterize the action and not substance – they are transposed attributes which can be verified by the transformation of the sentences.

Seminar Class

1.Give the general characteristic of the class of adjectives. Point out the specificity of adjectives in the system of parts of speech that allowed the linguists to describe the adjective as “the notorious swing category” (T. Givon).

2.Describe the composition and the structure of the adjective class. Speak about the prototypical structure of the adjective class. Dwell on the problem of the statives and decide whether they constitute a separate part of speech or a peripheral group inside the adjective class.

3.Speak about the functional interaction of adjectives with the other parts of speech. Disclose the meaning of the umbrella term

“substantivization”.

Exercises

I. Translate the sentences from Russian into English and from English into Russian and point out cases of cross-language asymmetry in the sphere of adjectives.

1.Было уже далеко за полночь, а он все еще не спал.

2.Это расстояние вполне можно пройти пешком.

3.Это кофе просто невозможно пить. Принесите мне лучше чаю.

4.Я нашел эту книгу в интернете, но ее нельзя «скачать».

5.Было два часа ночи, и все в доме крепко спали.

6.She was reluctant to answer our questions.

7.By the age of 13 he seemed to have read all the books in the home library.

8.Language must above all be learnable.

9.We were impatient to start the game.

10.He was absolutely unaware of the danger.

11. She was loseable. She was free! (I. Murdoch).

II. Analyze the use of adjectives in the following sentences and put them into the appropriate classes: qualitative or relative, central or peripheral.

1.A luxurious sense of freedom welled up (C. Thuborn).

2.It is my earliest recollection: telling the Moon Lady my secret wish (Amy Tan).

3.Electromagnetic theory was one of the fields he had flunked on his own Ph.D. qualifying exam (E. Segal).

4.She lay awake trying to imagine her future life (E. Segal).

5.After five years of separation he appeared to be a total stranger.

6.Her father was a criminal lawyer.

7.We sat on a wooden bench in the corner of the room.

8.She answered our questions with a wooden expression of her face.

9.He looked gloomy and unapproachable.

III. Analyze the sentences and comment on the cases of the adjective interaction with other parts of speech.

1.I’ll arrange if it is arrangeable (H. Wouk).

2.I never used to be sure when he was being serious or when he wasn’t (J. Osborne).

3.“They have no gardener now”. “Why?” I was curious (E. O’Brien).

4.He was pleased to be able to boast that a cousin of his had married one of the most celebrated (S. Maugham).

5.He’s been working like a black (I. Murdoch).

6.She appeared in several musicals and was a moderate success.

7.From the sublime to the ridiculous there is only one step.

8.I went to see them last spring when she was expecting her second (M. Drabble).

9.I suppose I was just plain jealous (D. Smith).

10.“Don’t talk so loud, Murph”, Sonia whispered (I. Shaw).

I. Give the definition of the following phenomena:

the grammatical form, transposition, lexicalization, the category of tense, the category of case

II. Give a detailed answer to one of the following questions:

1.The peculiarities of the grammatical structure of English.

2.The grammatical category of Number in English Nouns.

3.The grammatical category of Aspect in English Verbs.

III. Do the following practical assignment:

1.What peculiarity of the grammatical structure of English is manifested in the following sentences:

I don’t think he will ever make a good lawyer. How do you make a living as a painter? The bullet made a hole right through his chest.

2.Analyze the following oppositions and say what grammatical categories they constitute:

has :: has had; will take :: will be taken; is done :: has been done.

3.Differentiate between neutralization and transposition in the following sentences:

This book is worth reading.

His father is constantly complaining of something. On coming home he went straight to his room.

4.Point out and define the cases of syntactic transposition in the sphere of parts of speech:

E.g. “He was a bit embarrassed” (Noun  Adverb):

It is believed that the gap between the rich and the poor is growing.

It won’t make an awful lot of difference if I don’t pass the test.

He was elected in the normal manner.

5.Supply the forms of the plural:

6. Define the syntagmatic meaning of the Possessive Case:

It is only a stone’s throw away. I need to go to the hairdresser’s.

The people’s voices drowned in the roar of the started engines.

7.State the function of the underlined verb:

Something must be done to stop the fighting. The letter seemed to have remained unnoticed. They have had to change their plans suddenly. I kept on hoping that he’d phone me.

8.State the form of the mood in the following sentences:

If it were in my power, I wouldn’t hesitate to interfere. And God said, Let there be light: there was light.

I prefer that Jane should do it.

I wish that I hadn’t eaten so much.