GRAMMATICAL MEANING. GRAMMATICAL FORM

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 862.

I. MAIN NOTIONS OF GRAMMAR

UNIT III

1. Grammatical meaning. Grammatical form.

2. Grammatical category.

The main objects of grammatical studies are the grammatical meaning and the grammatical form.

Analyzing the words ask, asked, will ask we see that their lexical meaning is the same. The difference is in the way the action 'to ask' is presented in the course of time: in the present, in the past and in the future. These meanings: 'the present', 'the past' and 'the future' are grammatical.

Grammatical meaning – is a general, abstract meaning typical of a certain class of words and expressed by the grammatical formal expression (or by the absence of the latter).

The difference between lexical and grammatical meanings of words depends upon the way (form) it is expressed. Really, lexical meanings of one linguistic unit can be found all at once only in the dictionary or in a person's memory but in speech only one meaning is revealed in a word at a time, that demanded by a situation or a given context.

e. g. Here are some examples illustrating the lexical meaning of the word mean:

a) John means to write ('intends').

b) A green light meansgo ('indicates').

c) Health means everything ('has importance').

d) His look was full of meaning ('special import').

e) What is the meaning of life ('point, purpose')?

f) What does 'capitalist'meanto you ('convey')?

g) What does 'cornea'mean ('refer to in the world')?

The functioning of grammatical meaning is clearly seen in the well-known example invented by L.V. Shcherba designed to illustrate grammatical means of expression:

e. g. Глокая куздра штеко будланула бокра и курдячит бокренка.

The parts of words which are not underlined are lexical morphemes. To analyze the sentence grammatically one need not know anything about the lexical meaning of words. The grammatical meanings are the same in the same forms of different words. Thus, asked, took, read, etc. are absolute grammatical synonyms. They differ lexically.

Grammatical form – that which expresses the grammatical meaning.

There are two types of grammatical forms: simple synthetic and analytical.

a) simple synthetic forms are units all the elements of which are written together.

The main synthetic means are: affixation (outer inflexion), sound-interchange (inner inflexion, infixation) and suppletivity. Sound-interchange and suppletivity are not productive in modern English.

In the words foot and feet we face sound-interchange, namely – vowel-interchange, or internal inflexion. In the book "A Course in English Grammar" B.S. Khaimovich, B.I. Rogovskaya write: "The relation between 'foot' and 'feet' is similar to the relation between 'book' and 'books'. But how are we to separate the "plural" morpheme in 'feet' from the lexical morpheme? In a general way we can say that everything distinguishing the form of 'feet' from that of 'foot' expresses "plurality". But the answer can be more elaborate. We may regard [f..t] as a discontinuous form of the lexical morpheme, [-u-] as the form of the grammatical morpheme of "singularity", and [-i-] as that of the morpheme of "plurality". Then [-u-] and [-i-] are grammatical morphemes inserted into a lexical one, and we deal with internal inflexion" [36, 14].

Speaking about suppletivity one should keep in mind the following criteria of the words being suppletive suggested by A.I. Smirnitsky: 1) words should be identical as to their lexical meaning; 2) they should have no parallel pairs; 3) other words belonging to the same class should build up the same opposition without suppletivity.

b) analytical forms are combinations elements of which are written separately.

Analytical forms consist of two main parts: the functional element and the notional element. The functional (auxiliary) element has no lexical significance of its own. The notional element is the semantic centre of the combination.

There are several criteria of analytical grammatical forms not to mix them up with free combinations of words:

a) they function as one semantic unit;

b) they perform the same syntactic role.

Thus, has come, is coming are analytical grammatical forms, he came, on the table are free combinations.

There is no certainty on the linguistic nature of such forms as shall / will + Inf. Some linguists treat them as analytical grammatical forms, others – as free combinations, or there is an opinion that they are modal phrases. In the first case we are to admit that in the English language there exists the grammatical future tense. If we admit the opposite point of view, then we naturally deny this category in English.

In the same way linguists approach combinations with more, most. If they are analytical grammatical forms then the grammatical category of degrees of comparison of adjectives does exist in the language, and it is expressed analytically.

Paradigms of words may consist of simple synthetic forms only as in boy – boys. A paradigm may embrace both: simple and analytical forms as in comes – has come. But pure analytical forms cannot form separate paradigms. The grammatical centre of any paradigm is always presented by simple synthetic forms.

All languages can be classified according to different criteria. The most commonly used criterion is the morphological structure of words, the way of expression of the syntactic ties between words.

Usually we treat English as an analytical language because it is rich in analytical forms. On the other hand, Russian, Greek, Latin, etc. in which synthetic forms prevail, are usually spoken of as synthetic ones.

Synthetic and analytical languages differ in:

a) the character of their morphology (morphology of the former is richer in forms);

b) prevailing of synthetic or analytical forms accordingly in paradigms of words;

c) the ability of words (in the isolated position) to reveal their belonging to a definite grammatical class (synthetic languages have the marker of such belonging – a formal grammatical expression);

d) frequency of use of non-morphological means of ties between words.

There exist the following features of analytical languages:

a) no use of inflexions;

b) no use of sound-interchange;

c) more or less fixed word order.

However, purely synthetic or analytical languages do not exist.