Item 5.

Text Grammar.

It appears in 60-s simultaneously in our country & abroad. The central idea is that not the sentence, but the text is the highest unit of language. Text is what you hear, read or produce. 2 kinds of texts: written & oral. The initial impulse is connected with logical division of a sentence. Actual division of the sentence & function sentence perspective.

I have | a pen. The pen is | nice.

Sentences in one text are not isolated but they are in some relations & this fact creates some specific text structure. Text structures can be described with the help theme-rheme division. Maskalskaya studied a lot of texts & singled out 3 structures that are most frequent.

Chain-like

T 1 R1

T 2 R2 is typical of explanation, narration.

T 3 R3 …

John is my friend. He is a future teacher. Teaching is a noble profession.

Fan-like arrangement

R1

T 1 R2

R3

My fiend is a student. He is the eldest son in his family. He lives in Moscow.

Hierarchical

T

T 1 T2 T3 desription.

R1 R2 R3

I like to walk in the forest. The sun is shining. Birds are singing. The grass is green.

In real texts we find various combination of these patterns where the same structure can be used several times & of different length. Each text possesses a unique & individual structure that can be described. There is another functional aspect of text analysis. Texts are analyzed as for style & communicative purpose.

Another branch of text grammar is the discourse analysis appeared abroad. The term discourse is understood in 2 ways. Wide of narrow sense. Narrow: discourse – portion of texts in which real meaning of a sentence is realized. Micro-context. Wide: discourse – situationally-bound text. The length of D is variable. Even 1-sentence utterance can be called D. Logically connected sentences make minimal texts. These sections are called super-phrasal units or micro-texts. The upper limit of the text can hardly be defined. It can be a whole story or novel. It is called macro-text. Macro-texts are characterized by relations of inclusion. The problem of text delimitation is a disputable problem. Linguists use a lot of related terms & some of them can be called doublets. They mean the same.

English	Russian
The super-phrasal unit	Сверхфразовое единство
The complex syntactic entity	Сложное синтаксическое целое
The super-sentential construction	Единица большая, чем предложение
The transphrasal whole	Межфразовое целое
The paragraph	Абзац
The discourse	Дискурс
The content block	Смысловой блок
The prosaic strophe	Прозаическая строфа
The texteme union	Союз\сообщество текстем
The microtext	Микротекст

Lecture 6.

12. 10. 2010.

Another challenge for text grammar is justification of the fact, that text is a unite of language, but not a chain of disconnected sentences. Sentences in the text are connected in 2 levels. The level of form & the level of meaning. It’s an obvious similarity with any other language sign, within 2 plains. Relations of meaning are described by the 1^st basic text category (topical (semantic entity)) – тематическаЯ целостность. If we change a topic, another text appers. The mechanism of text entity is based on constant change of themes & rhemes. Relations of form are described by the 2^nd text category – lexico-grammatical coherency. It reveals itself in some concrete language means of cohesion (средства связи).

Means of cohesion:

1. partial substitution;

2. reference (using pronouns instead of pronouns);

3. absolute (full) substitution;

4. repetition;

5. key words (semantic groupings) – direct relation to the topic of the text;

6. antonyms;

7. synonyms;

8. conjunctions;

9. derivatives – indirect repetition;

10. ellipsis – one of the elements is omitted.

Essentials of Morphology

1. Classification of morphemes;

2. grammatical meaning & grammatical form;

3. grammatical oppositions & grammatical categories;

4. reduction of grammatical oppositions;

Item 1

The morpheme is a minimal meaningful unit of language (but it not a sign).

Nowhere – no | where + now | here

French | man (2 morphemes) – German (1 morpheme)

Homonymy of morphemes

Root (shipwreck)

S hip

Suffix (friendship)

Morphemes: principles of classification:

Type of meaning:

1. lexical (roots); work-, long.

2. lexico-grammatical (prefixes, derivational suffixes); - er -.

3. grammatical (inner & outer flections, grammatical suffixes); - s, -er.

Presence / absence of meaning:

1. full (presence of ANY type of meaning) work-, long-.

2. empty (only structural function, no meaning) child | r | en, re | join | d | er, sale | s | man.

Interaction with other morphemes:

1. additive (book + s);

2. substitutional (man = m … n (add.) + - a – (subst.); men = m … n + - e -).

Structure:

1. continuous (book + s);

2. discontinuous ( a) m … n + - a -; b) has (visit) ed).

Degree of independence

1. free (only roots –if their form corresponds to the WORD) (visit-);

2. bound (all morphemes) (- ed).

Way of representation

1. segmental (= linear) (expressed by segmental phonetic means - phonemes) (all the examples above)

2. supersegmental (expressed by supersegmental means added to the linear structure of the word – a) stress, b) juncture, c) order of elements) (`import – im`port, annoys – a noise, outrun (v) – run out (n), in come (n) – come in).

Item 2

Linguistics is based on 2 types of meaning. Lexical meaning is individual, it denotes smth. It specifies this very word & relates it to other word with the same meaning.

A boy

A table

A lecture

Each of them has the lexical meaning of its own. Grammatical meaning – they are all nouns. Categorical meaning of substantivety. GM is more general. It unites big classes of words. All words of the same part of speech have the common categorical GM. Besides categorical M some specific GMs can be singled out in each part of speech. Nouns – case, number. Verbs – person, tense, voice, mood, aspect. Adjectives – degrees of comparison.

Any GM is expressed in some way. It can be an inflection (inner or outer), use of auxiliary verbs, suppletivism.

Grammatical form can be either synthetical or analytical. SFs consist of one element, & both grammatical & lexical meanings are expressed in it.

3 productive means

Inflection – morpheme added to the stem to change its form (pen – pens). Modern English has some particular features concerning inflections:

1. the number of inflections is limited;

2. there are many homonymous inflections (- ed);