6. Grammatical meaning, form, categories.

There are 3 fundamental notions: gr. form, gr. meaning, and gr. 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 gr. meaning is very abstract & general ex: oats-wheat: The gr. form of oats is clearly plural and gr. 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 gr. plural & wheat is gr. singular. There is no clear one-to-one correspondence between gr. 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 gr. form presents a division of a word of the principle of expressing a certain gr. meaning. Gr. meaning is very abstracted generalized meaning, which is expressed linguistically. Ex: Peter’s head-the gr. meaning of the category of case showing the relations between part and a whole. Gr. meaning is always expressed either explicitly or implicitly. For instance: The book reads well - here the gr. meaning of passivity is expressed implicitly. Gr. meaning is a system of expressing the gr. meaning through the paradigmatic correlation of gr. forms-expressed by gr. opposition, which can be of different types

1.Private

2.Gradual (large-larger-largest)

3.Equipollent-am is are

By the number of the opposemes opposition may be binary, tertiary, quaternary and so on. Any opposition can be reduced. The most important type of opposition is the binary privative opposition. The other type of opposition may be reduced to this kind of opposition.

Oppositional reductions (binary):

1.Neutralization: weak-strong

2.Transposition: strong-weak

How we express gr. meaning:

1.inflexions-pen-pens.

2.sound alternation-replacive morpheme (man-men).

3.Analitycal means with the help of analytical forms (discontinuous morphemes)

4.Suppletivity - different roots for gr. forms. I-me/go-went

7. Different aspects of English syntax (лекция 10)

Traditionally, Grammar is said to have 2 branches: Morphology and Syntax.

The basic notions of Syntax are the phrase and the sentence.

But nowadays even traditional schools of linguistics accept the fact that Syntax turns out to have different aspects. These are formal, semantic, communicative and pragmatic aspects.

Formal syntax deals with the plane of expression of syntactic units and all the rest deal with the plane of content.

Formal Syntax

The units and categories are defined according to the plane of expression. The weak point of Formal Syntax is that one and the same syntactic phenomenon can be classified differently: e.g. a trip to Moscow. This phrase can be identified as attributive or objective (complementive) or adverbial. So we shall have to choose the answer that seems to us to be the ‘better’ one, i.e. to apply personal taste and opinion. The result will inevitably be subjective. The matter may also be settled by convention, i.e. we may declare that we shall consider, say, every prepositional phrase modifying a noun to be an attribute (that is actually done in most English grammars). That’s why the more general term ‘complement’ seems to be more suitable.

On the whole, Formal Syntax gives priority to the form of syntactic units. As a result, we’ve got a well-grounded system of structural elements and means of syntactic relations at the levels of the phrase and the sentence. These are well-known theories of parts of the sentence, types of syntactic relations, subordinative and coordinative phrases, the head word and its adjunct in a subordinative phrase. It is the description of the formal structure of syntactic units.

Semantic Syntax

The sentence is considered to be a complicated sign, the name of a situation. It’s the aspect of semantic representation. e.g. John ordered Harry to leave. John expected Harry to leave. The sentences have very different properties and they can be accounted for by assuming some ‘higher’ level of representation. It reflects the difference in the meaning of the sentences. Order is a three-place predicate; expect is a two-place predicate. Then there must be some ‘higher’ or ‘more abstract’ level of representation than the surface structure.

W.Chafe claims that every sentence is built around a predicative element, which is usually, though not always, accompanied by one or more nominal elements. In the sentence Harriet sang there is a predicative element sang accompanied by the nominal element Harriet. Traditionally we speak about the verb and the noun. But these terms have been used most often for elements of surface or syntactic structures, not for semantic elements. W.Chafe suggests the terms predicate and argument for verb and noun respectively. Arguments may also be called participants or semantic roles.

The objectives of Semantic Syntax are to reveal the deep (semantic) structure of the sentence, compare it to the formal surface structure and reveal the difference in the classes of arguments and predicates, and thus build a semantic classification of arguments and predicates.

Communicative Syntax

The communicative meaning doesn’t contain the information about the subject of the speech act; it doesn’t include denotation or subjective attitude. It deals with the arrangement and structure of the process of communication itself. The grammatical meanings are in the first place the meaning of grammatical person, actual sentence division and communicative type of sentence.

The communicative nature of grammatical person is directly connected with verbal communication. The communicative categories are the 1 person – the speaker and the 2 person – the listener. As to the 3 person, it is opposed both to the 1 and 2 person and it is excluded from communication.

The actual sentence division (or functional sentence perspective) reveals the correlative significance of the sentence parts from the point of view of their actual informative role in an utterance. The main components of the actual division of the sentence are the theme and the rheme. The theme expresses the starting point of communication. The rheme expresses the main informative part of communication. Between the theme and the rheme are positioned intermediary, transitional parts of the actual division of various degrees of informative value. The theme may or may not coincide with the subject of the sentence. The rheme may or may not coincide with the predicate of the sentence.

Historically, the theory of actual sentence division is connected with the logical division of the proposition. The principal parts of the proposition are the logical subject and the logical predicate. They may or may not coincide, respectively, with the subject and predicate of the sentence. The logical categories of subject and predicate are prototypes of the linguistic categories of theme and rheme.

This kind of sentence division is opposed to the formally grammatical (purely syntactical) division of the sentence.

An early attempt to revise traditional communicative classification of sentences was made by the American scholar Ch.Fries. He classified them according to the responses they elicit into communicative and non-communicative. Communicative utterances are divided into 3 types:

Utterances regularly eliciting ‘oral’ responses only: greetings, calls, questions.

Utterances regularly eliciting ‘action’ responses, sometimes accompanied by one of a limited list of oral responses: requests or commands.

Utterances regularly eliciting conventional signals of attention to continuous discourse: statements.

The latter exceeds the others in frequency – 60% of the bulk. Questions – over 28%; requests – less than 7%; greetings – 4% and calls – less than 1%.

Ch.Fries recorded non-communicative utterances in incidental notes as he heard them - or rather as he overheard them, for they occurred usually when the speaker was alone. The situations in which they appeared were not those in which the speaker was using speech forms in order to elicit particular responses from hearers. The utterances were not directed to a listener – even to the speaker himself as a hearer. E.g. oh, wow, my God, goodness, ouch. They have some ‘meaning’ because they are usually associated with particular situations (ouch – sudden pain).

Pragmatic Syntax

The object of Pragmatic Syntax is the relation between language units and their users, and how these linguistic units are used in speech, on what conditions. This is the social side of language.

In other words, pragmalinguistics studies ways of expressing different purposes of communication of the speaker, i.e. his communicative intentions. Sentences of the same structural type may turn out to be completely different:

e.g. Come! (a command, a request)

e.g. I’ll watch you!(a statement of a fact, a menace, a promise)

At first sight, the difference between the sentences seems to be found in different contexts or situations. But it’s not really so. Sentences which differ in their pragmatics also differ in their semantic and structural properties.

The study of sentence pragmatics is a major part of language learning because mastering the language presupposes not only language competence (i.e. ability to generate sentences), but also communicative competence (i.e. ability to use sentences in speech acts in order to achieve the response).

According to the principles of pragmalinguistics, communicative intentions of the speaker are realized in speech acts. Each speech act is characterized by a definite communicative intention underlying it. Such are statements of fact, confirmations, refutations, agreements, disagreements, commands, requests, greetings, recommendations, promises, menaces, etc.

Among speech acts classified as pragmatic utterance types, there are 2 types which are mutually opposed and which are crucially important. These are constative utterances (constatives) and performative utterances (performatives). Constatives express the speaker’s reflections of reality: e.g. he congratulated me. He apologized. By pronouncing a performative, the speaker performs his complete function. By saying I congratulate you; I apologize the speaker is performing an action. Hence the term ‘performative utterance’.

The performative utterance usually includes (or implies) the pronoun of the 1 person Singular (the direct indication of the speaker), while its verb is used only in the form of the present tense of the Indicative mood, active. So, the verb can’t be used in the form of the past or future tense. A performative can’t be negative. Modal verbs are not used in such structures either. ? We hereby request… Passengers are requested… Our request is…

A performative implies a new state of the object: I pronounce you man and wife. I name this ship… I swear…

Let’s compare:

I declare the conference open.

I declared the conference open.

I would have declared the conference open if…

He declares the conference open.

8. Notional categories and their relation to Grammar (лекция)

Nowadays Grammar makes use of a lot of theories and synthesizes them. One of the main problems of modern Grammar is the analysis of notional categories (NC).

NC may be related to a number of branches of knowledge linguistic proper and cognate to linguistics (the study of speech generating process, psycholinguistics, comutaprocessing of Texts, artificial intelligent)

The term ‘NC’ was introduced by Otto Jesperson in the work ‘The Philosophy of Grammar in 1924’: “Above the syntactic categories, which depend on the structure of each members, there are some extralinguistic categories which are more or less independent, these are universal categories and they are applicable to all languages. NC face both the universal categories and laws of logic on the one hand, on the other – lingual material, which is overtly expressed. Being connected to logic and psychology, they belong to neither => they possess relatively independent status.”

NC vs. semantic categories

There is no one-to-one correspondence between them; NC are more closely connected with the real world, then the semantic categories (semantic cat – sphere of language, NC - speech). Thus, there may be some asymmetry between the plane of notions and semantics.

E.g., The builders are constructing the house (correspondence of notional and semantic categories of agent – they are explicated through ‘builders’)

The house is being constructed (semantic category of agent is not to be found ‘cause there is no linguistic sign, still the agent as the notional category is clearly state in the mind)

E.g., the category of evaluation – not a grammatical category, but is usually expressed by grammatical means (It’s fabulous) or with the help of syntactic structures (I believe that); it has nothing to do with any morphological category.

Or the category of negation – in reality we have no negation, there are some polar phenpmena (change of day/night, water/ice), besides we use affirmative structures parallel to negative ones (they are even sometimes more preferable)

He is not present – He is absent. He has not come – He failed to come.

Or the category of determination (definite vs. indefinite) – person thinks of something as definite depending on the degree of cognition; it is linguistically expressed with the held of intonation, word order, articles and so on. We have the morphological category of determination of English nouns (specific only about morphological change of forms of Eng nouns)

(There is some difference between all the types of categories: morphological – only to 1 part of speech, syntactic – on the level of syntactic structures, semantic – broader, both morphological, syntactic, suprasentential means, notional – universal, non dependent on a language)

Developed the theory of NC – Кацнельсон, Жирмундский, Мещанинов, Бандарка, Кобрина

In foreign linguistics – W. Chase, R. Langacker – cognitive Grammar nowadays