34

Introduction

Students who are taking this course, are expected to have gained the practical mastery of the elements of English grammar at the earlier stages of tuition.

So the aims of this course are:

1. To present a systematic study of the grammatical structure of Modern English in order to get a more profound insight into the subject. The course is aimed at forming a complete picture of all the knowledge in Grammar the students have acquired before.

2. To draw the students’ attention to the aspects of grammatical phenomena which were presented in the previous practical courses of English neither systematically nor to their full extent or were not mentioned at all due to lack of time or their complexity.

3. These tasks will be fulfilled with a special accent on the comparison analysis of various grammatical properties which are very important to be taken into account when doing a translation from English into Russian and vice versa.

It is a common knowledge that all the humanity live on the same planet which means that

• we all live in approximately identical temporal and territorial environments,

• we experience the same feelings and emotions,

• we have nearly the same attitudes and reactions to various realities of our life

It’s all because the processes of thinking of human beings are actually similar all over the world.

The differences lie only in the historically developed culture of each people’s society and the language they use for communication.

It is people’s ability to abstract thinking, to generalization of concrete manifestations of our life and various natural phenomena that have given rise to the appearance of a special code sign system which is called a language. So language is the means by which people can manifest results of their thinking processes though every nation does so in its own specific way. No wonder, that if you manage to master the sign code of a different nationality you are sure to be able to exchange and to share your thoughts with the people, whose language you have learned and you are certain to understand each other (though there are of course cultural differences that are to be observed by you).

The subject we are going to deal with is one of the three constituent parts of language which are phonology/phonetics (sounds, phonemes, intonation), lexis / lexical system (vocabulary) and grammar. It is Grammar that has the generalizing function, which allows to form strict rules of writing and speaking correctly in this or that language. These rules dictate specific ways of word changing and their linking to each other inside a sentence.

Though these rules differ from language to language they actually reflect similar realities and phenomena that surround people. So if we understand which way this or that reality is reflected in the foreign language and what is the difference between their way and the way it is reflected in our native language it will be no problem for us to express this idea by means of the foreign language.

Let’s compare the ways Russians and Englishmen express verbal actions referred to different times.

Я иду! What ideas are expressed by this form? (the action is referred to the present and the action is taking place at the moment of speech) An Englishman when expressing similar meanings will resort to the form “I am coming!”

Я приду. ( the action is referred to the future, the communicative meaning is that of a promise, In Russian I would choose the form with the prefix ‘при’) An Englishman will resort to the simple future form ‘I will come’.

Я буду приходить к вам каждый день. (the action is referred to the future too, it is also a promise but of some regular action) An Englishman will resort to the future continuous tense form: ‘I’ll be coming to you every day.’

Я приду к 7-ми часам. (The action is referred to the future with the concrete indication of the time by which it will have been performed). An Englishman to express this idea will resort to the form which is called the future perfect: I will have come by 7.

Я пришел. (the action is referred to the past but it is closely attached to the present by its result.) – I have come.

Я приходил вчера. (the action is referred to the past and there is no connection with the present) In English the action will be expressed by the simple past – ‘I came yesterday.’

Seminar 1. Specific features of the English grammatical structure in comparison with the

features of the grammatical structure of the Russian language

Every language has been developing and is developing in accordance with its own internal laws and has built a specific grammatical structure with its own characteristic features.

There are various types of Languages’ grammatical structures. Talking about English and Russian, they belong to two different types. English has the analytical grammatical structure while Russian is of the synthetical structure . Let’s consider their differences and peculiarities.

Synthetical languages (Russian)	Analytical languages (English)
1. A widely spread system of affixes for manifestation of various grammatical meanings. In Russian there is a good number of form-building suffixes and other means to express the plural of nouns: дом – дома; окно-окна; стол – столы; мяч – мячи; стул – стулья; дочь – дочери; сын – сыновья; учитель – учителя.	1. A scarce system of affixation for expressing grammatical categories. In English the main suffix to express plurality of nouns is the suffix –s / -es. There is also a small group of English nouns that form their plural by sound alteration or with the help of the old English suffix –en: man – men; woman – women; foot – feet; tooth – teeth; child – children; goose - geese; mouse – mice; louse – lice; ox – oxen; brother - brethren
2. A larger number of grammatical categories in comparison with the other type of language. The Russian adjective has not only the category of the degrees of comparison, but also the categories of number, gender and case. Thanks to the category of gender the Russian verb when being conjugated has special suffixes to agree with the pronoun or noun in the position of the subject. So we have the following picture: In the present: Я пою. Ты поешь. Он, она, оно поет Мы поем Вы поете Они поют In the past: пел, пела, пели	2. Lack of some grammatical categories that exist in the synthetical languages or some categories have a very scarce formal presentation. The English adjective has only the category of the degrees of comparison. In English the variety of verb forms in case of conjugation is very scarce. In the present: I sing. You sing. He, she, it sings. We sing. You sing. They sing. In the past: sang for all persons and numbers.
3 Thanks to the abundance of various inflections / word-forming suffixes/ words in Russian are attached to each other without prepositions: ножка стола махнуть рукой писать ручкой писать карандашом The majority of Russian verb agree with the following words without prepositions either: Учитель объяснил правило студентам. Он любит слушать современную музыку Мы ждем его прихода. Though there are quite many verbs which are governed by prepositions. Sometimes the latter coincide with the English verbs of the same meaning, though it’s a rare case: Семья состоит из 5 человек. Все зависит от нас. Он придет к нам на обед.	3. A sparing use of affixation leads in English to a wider use of prepositions to denote relations between words in order to connect them: the leg of the table to wave by the hand to write with a pen to write in pencil More often than not English verbs are governed by prepositions The teacher explained the rule to the students. He likes to listen to modern music. We are waiting for his arrival. The family consists of 5 people. All depends on us. He’ll come to us for dinner.
4. The majority of grammatical forms in Russian are synthetic, which means that all the grammatical meanings are represented in one form due to the wide network of affixes: Приду (will come), ушел (has left), проработал 10 лет (has been working). When calling one language synthetical and another – analytical it should be noted that the statement doesn’t mean that the opposite forms don’t exist in each type of language. There are in Russian analytical forms as well: Мы будем выполнять этот заказ сообща. (the future tense form) Some Russian forms of degrees of comparison of adjectives and adverbs are analytical: сильный – более сильный – самый сильный; правильно – более правильно – наиболее правильно.	4. The majority of grammatical forms are analytical, that is consisting of two components: the auxiliary part and the notional part inside one form. These are: Most of verbal aspect tense forms of active voice; All the forms of the passive voice of the English verb; Some forms of the subjunctive mood of the verb; The negative and interrogative forms of the verb The forms of the degrees of comparison of multisyllabled adjectives and adverbs. Synthetical forms are found in English too. These are: –s in the third person, singular in the simple present; –s in the plural forms of the noun; –‘s in the possessive case forms of nouns; –ed in the verbal forms of the past simple; –er / -est in the forms of the degrees of comparison in one-syllable adjectives and adverbs.
5. A free word-order Мой брат уехал вчера в Москву. На улице пошел дождь. Однажды приехали к нам нежданные гости.	5. A relatively fixed word-order: Subject + Predicate + Object + Adverbial modifiers: His dog has bitten the little boy in the leg. My brother went to Moscow yesterday. It started to rain outside. Once we had unexpected guests. / Once unexpected guests arrived at our place. The whole sense of a sentence depends on the word-order in English: The mother loves her children very much. The children love their mother very much. It is because every position of the word in a sentence is grammatically meaningful.

However, the English language used to belong to the synthetical type of languages. The old English period (700 – 1100) had a rather sophisticated and subtle system of synthetic forms. It used to have a similar to Russian system of cases (the nominative, the accusative, the dative, the genitive, the instrumental) . The case category covered the adjectives which were to agree with the modified nouns in number, case and gender. The verb had a variety of suffixes to express the categories of person and number. Towards the end of the old English period and through the middle English period (that lasted from the 11-th century up to the 15-th), the synthetical forms gradually were disappearing, the grammatical forms were losing their inflexions and hence their grammatical categories and the grammatical structure of the English language was gradually changing into an analytical type of structure.

Grammar consists of two parts: morphology and syntax. Morphology deals with the forms of words and their grammatical categories; syntax deals with phrases and sentences and with rules of the words’ connections in the sentence.

Before we start discussing the items related to morphology we are to dwell upon a couple of issues concerning suffixes and other means of the grammatical word change.

First of all when using the term ‘suffix’ we must differentiate between word-building suffixes and form-building suffixes.

Word-building suffixes are related to the building of words which belong to different parts of speech: work – worker, translate – translation - translator, depend – dependence – dependent, possible – possibility, coward – cowardice and so on.

While discussing morphological forms we’ll deal mostly with form-building suffixes which manifest various grammatical meanings in accordance with the grammatical category. The latter expresses the realities reflected in the language via the process of generalization. For example, to express the idea of plurality of some objects, there is a special suffix in the English language: –s /-es, which is added to the root of the word. This suffix indicates that we are talking about a number of objects, not one. So the existence of such pairs of words as: a table –tables, a boy – boys, an idea – ideas speaks for the existence of the grammatical category of number for the group of words which are referred to as nouns.

Thus, grammatical category forms are represented by form-building suffixes.

Another productive means of form-building in English is vowel alteration: write – wrote – written, sing – sang – sung, man - men, woman – women, tooth – teeth, foot – feet.

All the grammatical forms of one word constitute its paradigm. Every word has its own paradigm. Two words may belong to the same part of speech but they may have different paradigms according to their individual properties. Let’s take two nouns: a boy and advice.

An English noun has only two categories. One is that of number and the second is that of case. As for the first word, a boy, it has the following forms: boy, boys, boy’s, boys’ ( 4 grammatical forms which constitute its paradigm and manifest the existence of the two grammatical categories characteristic of the noun). As for the second, advice, it has only one form: advice.

Adjective: good, better, best

Verb: Work, worked, working, works, am working, is working, was working, have worked, has worked, will work, would work, ….

Seminar 2. Parts of speech

The classification of words into various parts of speech is based on the following three principles: meaning, form, function.

• By meaning we don’t mean the individual meaning of each separate word (its lexical meaning) but the generalized meaning common to all the words of the given class.

For example, the general meaning of the noun is that of “thingness” which includes

words denoting substances (individuals, objects), words naming qualities (kindness),

processes (conversation, translation), abstract notions (time, power, love, hatred).

The meaning of the verb as a type of word is that of “process, action”.

All adjectives express some sort of “quality”.

• By form we mean the morphological characteristics of a type of word, its paradigm. Thus, the noun is characterized by 2 categories: the category of number (a boy, boys) and the category of case (a boy’s, boys’).

• By function we mean the syntactical properties of the word which includes the behaviour of the word on the phrasal level, i.e. the word’s combining with other words ( a boy, the boy, some boy, a small boy, the boy’s hat, the boy is running, the boy over there, after the boy, at the boy) and the position of the word inside the sentence ( a boy: subject, object, attribute, part of the compound nominal predicate, adverbial modifier).

According to these principles words fall into certain classes called parts of speech.

We distinguish between notional (independent) parts of speech, which have their individual lexical meaning and formal parts of speech which serve to connect words in a phrase or a sentence, they also serve to specify or emphasize the meaning of words.

The notional parts of speech: The noun The adjective The pronoun The numeral The verb The adverb / stative words (asleep, afraid)

The formal parts of speech: The article The preposition The conjunction

Though the formal parts of speech denote relations and connections between notional words we can’t ignore the fact that they also have general or individual meanings.

Let’s have a look at the article. The indefinite article originates from the old English numeral “an” (“one”), so this meaning of ‘oneness” is implied in every noun the article is used with. The noun with the indefinite article is always in the singular, and denotes one object or substance in number. Sometimes this meaning becomes very prominent: A stitch in time saves nine. Wait a minute. She didn’t say a word.

The definite article historically goes back to the old English demonstrative pronouns, hence the meaning of ‘indication’ (pointing at something) also gets sometimes quite prominent: The two brothers are very much alike. The man standing by the window is our teacher.

Prepositions in many cases have absolutely clear meanings: The bag is on the chair. The bag is under the chair. The bag is near the chair.

Conjunctions can also add some special meaning to the general sense expressed in the sentence:

The match was postponed because it was raining. It was raining but the match was not postponed. Because expresses the causative connection between the two actions, but expresses the adversative coordination between the actions.

The notional parts of speech

The noun

Semantically all English nouns are classified into the following classes:

A. Common nouns

1. Countables denoting

• objects (a table, a chair)

• living beings ( a man, a dog)

• natural phenomena (a storm, a snowfall)

• abstract notions (an idea, a month)

2. Uncountables denoting

• mass substances (bread, ice)

• abstract notions (courage, hatred)

3. Collective nouns denoting

• objects (furniture, machinery)

• living beings (family, police, cattle)

B. Proper nouns:

• people’s names

• names of places, geographical names: Africa, France, Bermuda, New York, Everest, the Urals, the UK, Trafalgar square, the Channel, the Thames, the City.

• names of months and days

• names of newspapers and magazines: The Washington Post, Economist, Time, the Times.

• Important buildings and institutions : Buckingham Palace, Cambridge University, the British Museum, the White House, the EU, the BBC.

The grammatical meaning of the noun is “thingness” which implies naming objects, living beings, places (forest, London), materials (iron, oil), processes (life, laughter), states (sleep, consciousness), feelings, emotions ( anger, happiness, joy,satisfaction), abstract notions (talent, peace), qualities (kindness, courage, beauty) and others.

The grammatical forms are determined by the morphological characteristics of the two grammatical categories: number and case.

As for gender, it doesn’t find regular morphological expression.

• The distinction of male, female and neuter may correspond to the lexical meaning of the noun ( man, woman, table).

• It may be expressed by word-building feminine suffixes: -ess (actress), -ine (heroine) or –ette (usherette).

• Gender may be indicated lexically in such compounds as a boy-friend, a woman- doctor, a he-wolf, a she-cousin.

• There are also some traditional associations of certain nouns with gender, for example:

1) Moon and earth are referred to as she,

2) Sun -- as he

3) Names of vessels (ship, boat, steamer, ice-breaker, cruiser, etc), vehicles (car, carriage, coach) and countries are referred to as she

The new ice-breaker has started on her maiden voyage.

She is a fine car.

England is proud of her poets.

The grammatical functions: subject, object, attribute, part of compound nominal predicate (predicative), adverbial modifier.