3. The notion of grammatical forms, category and opposition.

There are 3 fundamental notions: grammatical form, grammatical meaning, and grammatical category. Notional words possess some morphemic features expressing grammatical meanings. They determine the grammatical form of the word.

Grammatical form is not confined to an individual meaning of the word because grammatical meaning is very abstract & general ex: oats-wheat: The grammatical form of oats is clearly plural and grammatical form of wheat is singular, but we can’t say that oats are more than one& wheat is one. So here we say that oats is grammatical. Plural & wheat is grammatical singular. There is no clear one-to-one correspondence between grammatical category of singular & plural and counting them in reality in terms of “one” and “more than one”.

A very vivid example confirming the rightness of this statement is connected with the category of gender with biological sex ex: bull-cow, so the grammatical form presents a division of a word of the principle of expressing a certain grammatical. meaning.

Grammatical meaning is very abstractive generalized meaning, which is linguistically expressed. ex: Peter’s head -the grammatical meaning of the category of case showing the relations between part and a whole.

Grammatical meaning is always expressed either explicitly or implicitly. For instance: The book reads well here the grammatical. meaning of passivity is expressed implicitly.

Grammatical meaning is a system of expressing the grammatical meaning through the paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms-expressed by grammatical opposition, which can be of different types:

Private

Gradual-large-larger-largest

Equipollent-am is are

Any grammatical category must be represented by at least two grammatical forms (e.g. the grammatical category of number – singular and plural forms). The relation between two grammatical forms differing in meaning and external signs is called opposition – book::books (unmarked member/marked member). All grammatical categories find their realization through oppositions, e.g. the grammatical category of number is realized through the opposition singular::plural.

Taking all the above mentioned into consideration, we may define the grammatical category as the opposition between two mutually exclusive form-classes (a form-class is a set of words with the same explicit grammatical meaning).

4, 8. Grammatical homonymy in morphology and syntax.

Morphological synonymy reflects a variety of representations by different parts of speech for the same meaning, e.g. due to (adjective), thanks to (noun), because of (preposition), etc. Morphological homonymy may be described as phonetic equivalents with different grammatical functions, e.g. He looks – her looks; they wanted – the job wanted; smoking is harmful – a smoking man; you read – we saw you, etc.

Two or more morphemes may sound the same but be basically different, that is, they may be homonyms. Thus the -er morpheme indicating the doer of an action as in writer has a homonym — the morpheme -er denoting the comparative degree of adjectives and adverbs, as in longer. Which of the two homonymous morphemes is actually there in a given case can of course only be determined by examining the other morphemes in the word. Thus, the morpheme -er in our first example, writer, cannot possibly be the morpheme of the comparative degree, as the morpheme writ- to which it is joined on is not the stem of an adjective or adverb, and so no comparative degree is to be thought of here.

In cases of polysemy and homonymy, two or more units of the plane of content correspond to one unit of the plane of expression. For instance, the verbal form of the present indefinite (one unit in the plane of expression) polysemantically renders the grammatical meanings of habitual action, action at the present moment, action taken as a general truth (several units in the plane of content). The morphemic material element -s/-es (in pronunciation [-s, -z, -iz]), i.e. one unit in the plane of expression (in so far as the functional semantics of the elements is common to all of them indiscriminately), homonymically renders the grammatical meanings of the third person singular of the verbal present tense, the plural of the noun, the possessive form of the noun, i.e. several units of the plane of content.

In cases of synonymy, conversely, two or more units of the plane of expression correspond to one unit of the plane

of content. For instance, the forms of the verbal future indefinite, future continuous, and present continuous (several units in the plane of expression) can in certain contexts synonymically render the meaning of a future action (one unit in the plane of content).