Distinctive features of grammatical category
1. It must be represented by, at least, two grammatical forms (they are limited in number and regular).the
Category of case in English (Common - Possessive), in Ukr - 6 forms.
2.No grammatical category can be represented by all the word forms of the word.
3.One word form can combine different grammatical categories.
4.No word form can combine 2 grammatical meanings of the same category.
5.Every word form must represent at least one categorial form or belong to some grammatical category. There are no word forms without grammatical categories.
Types of grammatical categories
Classifying: distribute words of a certain part of speech (countable :: uncountable nouns; definite :: indefinite nouns)
form-building (gender, number, tense)
Lexico-grammatical belong to one class of words (degrees of comparison of adjectives)
The basic feature of grammatical category is the absence of independent nominative function.
Types of Grammatical
Categories 1
referential (immanent) have references in the objective reality.
significational (reflective, relational) do not correspond to anything in the objective reality and correlate only with conceptual matters.
Types of grammatical categories
morphological – related to grammatical properties of words (according to the changeability of feature) of
1). lexico-grammatical type, groups of words opposed according to their grammatical properties: part-of-speech categories: noun, verb, transitivity, gender in Ukrainian
2). word form-changing categories number and case of nouns; degrees of comparison of adjectives and adverbs; tense, voice, aspect, mood of verbs;
syntactical – related to grammatical properties of sentences and phrases
predicativity, agent, a determiner phrase, compound sentence.
Grammatical meaning
Generalized abstract meaning, embracing large word classes that are expressed through formal markers (or zero markers)
Types of grammatical meaning
The implicit grammatical meaning is not expressed formally
the word “table” does not contain any
hints in its form as to it being inanimate.
The explicit grammatical meaning is
always marked morphologically (has its marker).
Types of grammatical meaning (ctd)
The general grammatical meaning is the meaning of the whole word-class, of a part of speech. Nouns have
the general grammatical meaning of thingness
The dependent grammatical meaning is the meaning of a subclass within the same part of speech which influences the realization of grammatical categories
restricting them to a subclass. countability/uncountability - the category of number
animateness/inanimateness - the category of case, teminativeness/non-terminativeness - the category
of tense, transitivity/intransitivity – the category of voice.
Types of grammatical meaning (ctd)
Referential which reflect objective properties of real phenomena (quantity, time, etc)
Relational (syntactic) which serve to combine words into phrases and sentences
Verbal number and person
Gender and number of Ukrainian adjectives
