17. Disputable questions of grammar. Gender and case, moods and tenses in English.

Gender of nouns in modern Eng. Some grammarians consider that there are 3 genders in modern Eng: the neuter (i.e. non-person) gender, the masculine (i.e. masculine person) gender, the feminine (i.e. feminine person) gender (Kobrina, Blokh). English nouns can show the sex by means of being combined with certain notional words used as sex indicators, or by suffixal derivation. Cf.: boy-friend, girl-friend; man-producer, woman-producer; washer-man, washer-woman; landlord, landlady; bull-calf, cow-calf; cock-sparrow, hen-sparrow; he-bear, she-bear; master, mistress; actor, actress; executor, executrix; lion, lioness; sultan, sultana; etc Other grammarians deny the existence of gender in modern Eng (Chernobrov, Arakin, Ivanova). There are no gender in modern Eng because there are no morphological index of gender. F.e. in Latin there are morphological index of gender (dura – суровая, durus - суровый). But some nouns are referred to as females (airplane, car, England, cow). But it’s semantic gender, not grammatical.

Case in Eng nouns. Case indicates the relations of the noun (or pronoun) to the other words in the sentence. There is no universal point of view as to the case system in English. Different scholars stick to a different number of cases. Four theories of cases: 1^st theory of positional cases (John (nominative и.п. case) gave Mary (dative д.п.) a book (accusative в.п.): John! (vocative зват.)); 2^nd theory of prepositional cases (of – genitive р.п.; by – instrumental твор.п.; to - dative); 3^rd theory of two cases (Blokh, Kobrina; these cases are nominative and genitive or common (и.п.) and possessive (р.п.)); 4^th theory of zero cases (Chern., Ivanova, Arakin; the possessive form is not a case form. Possesion is a separate category, f.e. голос его любимой старшей дочери – his favorite elder daughter’s voice – one ending for 4 words).

Mood. Moscow school (Arakin; indicative изъяв. – I go; Imperative – Go; Subjunctive I (God, save the queen); Subjunctive II (If I were a blue bird); Conditional (I would fly to…); Suppositional предположительное (Should he come some other day)). Leningrad school (Кобрина, Ильинш; Subjunctive I = Pr Subj; Subj II = Past Subj; other moods are called analytical).

Tense. The material world exists in time and space and these 2 most important notions are reflected in human thinking and through it in the language. Grammatical tense is a way languages express the time at which an event described by a sentence occurs. In English, this is a property of a verb form, and expresses only time-related information. There are prospective (future tenses – f. in the past, f perf) tenses and retrospective (past tenses – f in the past, past perf). Dependent (are tenses that can not stay alone – He said he would come to school) tenses and Independent tenses (are tenses that can stand alone – I go to school).

18. Word groups and their types. Types of relations in word groups.

Types of word groups: 1. Coordinate (a boy and a girl); 2. Subordinate (clever girl: “girl” – nuclear word; “clever” – subordinate, dependent word). Types of relations between words: 1. Concord (согласование); 2. Government (управление). One of typological difference between Russian and English language is that concord in Eng is very rare in comparison to Rus (this girl – these girls). Government is a type of relation when the nuclear word governs the dependent word. The nuclear word is usually a verb, f.e. hope for the best, multiply by two.

19. Sentence. Communicative types of sentence. Sentence and utterance. Theory of speech acts.

The sentence is the immediate integral unit of speech built up of words according to a definite syntactic pattern and distinguished by a contextually relevant communicative purpose. 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. Classification of sentences: 1. According to structural features: simple and composite; two-member and one- member sentences. Elliptical and one-member sentences (Marvelous! Horrible! How very interesting!; No birds singing at the dawn (Strong resemblance to 2 member sentences); I saw him there. Yesterday (parselation)); 2. According to the purpose of the utterance: declarative (immediately expresses a certain proposition), interrogative (expresses an inquiry about information which the speaker does not possess), imperative (based on a proposition, without formulating it directly), exclamatory. Communicative Types of Sentences. The sentence is a communicative unit, therefore primary classification of sentence must be based on the communicative principle - the purpose of communication. Traditional grammar recognized three cardinal sentence-types: the declarative sentence expresses a statement, either affirmative or negative; the imperative sentence expresses inducement, either affirmative or negative; the interrogative sentence expresses a question, i.e. request for information wanted by the speaker from the listener. Interrogative sentences are subdivided into general questions and special questions, disjunctive questions and alternative questions. The last 2 types of questions may be treated as variants of the first 2 types. The general question is that one in which the relations between the subject and the predicate are questioned. Such questions require a positive or negative answer (yes - no). In special questions we ask about some definite or specific information, which is marked by the interrogative pronoun or adverb, (d) the exclamatory sentence. An utterance (выражение в словах, произнесение) is a complete unit of speech in spoken language. It can be represented and delineated in written language in many ways. Note that utterances do not exist in written language, only their representations do. Notions: the act of uttering; vocal expression; the power of speaking; speech (as long as I have utterance); a manner of speaking (argued with forceful utterance); Something uttered or expressed; a statement. [speech: words, comment, opinion, remark, expression, announcement, observation, declaration, reflection, speaking: voicing, expression, breathing, articulation, vocalization]. Speech act is a technical term in linguistics and the philosophy of language. In the course of performing speech acts we ordinarily communicate with each other. The content of communication may be identical, or almost identical, with the content intended to be communicated, as when a speaker asks a family member to wash the dishes by asking, "Could you please do the dishes?" However, the meaning of the linguistic means used may also be different from the content intended to be communicated. I may, in appropriate circumstances, request Peter to do the dishes by just saying, "Peter ...!", or I can promise to do the dishes by saying, "Me!" Searle (1975) in his thery of speech acts has set up the following classification of speech acts: assertive = speech acts that commit a speaker to the truth of the expressed proposition; directives = speech acts that are to cause the hearer to take a particular action, e.g. requests, commands and advice; commissives = speech acts that commit a speaker to some future action, e.g. promises and oaths; expressives = speech acts that expresses on the speaker's attitudes and emotions towards the proposition, e.g. congratulations, excuses and thanks; declaratives = speech acts that change the reality in accord with the proposition of the declaration, e.g. baptisms, pronouncing someone guilty or pronouncing someone husband and wife.