Lectures in Theory of ENGLISH Grammar

D.G.Bogushevich, M.K.Vetoshkina, I.V.Dmitrieva, N.P.Petrashkevich, G.S.Prokopchuk

Lectures in Theory of ENGLISH Grammar

 

PART I..............................................................................................................................................................................................

Chapter 1. General Notions of Grammar.........................................................................................................

§1. GRAMMAR IN LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR IN KNOWLEDGE........................................................................

§2.GRAMMAR AS KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE..........................................................................................................

§3. VARIANTS OF GRAMMARS..........................................................................................................................................

§4.TYPES OF GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS......................................................................................................................

§5.DISTRIBUTIONAL GRAMMAR. SEGMENTATION PROCEDURES..................................................................

§6.DISTRIBUTIONAL GRAMMAR. BASIC NOTIONS................................................................................................

§7. DISTRIBUTIONAL GRAMMAR. IMMEDIATE CONSTITUENTS......................................................................

§8. TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. BASIC NOTIONS......................................................................................

§9. TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. ANALYTIC PROCEDURES....................................................................

§10.CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. GRAMMATICAL MEANING.................................................................................

§11. CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. OPPOSITIONS...........................................................................................................

12. CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. CATEGORIES..............................................................................................................

§13. CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. PARADIGMS.............................................................................................................

§14. STRATIFICATION OF LANGUAGE..........................................................................................................................

§15. CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. DIVISION OF GRAMMAR.....................................................................................

§16. CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. MORPHOLOGY........................................................................................................

§17. CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. SYNTAX.....................................................................................................................

§18. MORPHOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY...............................................................................................................................

§19.SYNTACTICAL TYPOLOGY.......................................................................................................................................

§20. UNITS LARGER THAN A SENTENCE.....................................................................................................................

CHAPTER II. SOME GRAMMATICAL FEATURES OF UNITS LARGER THAN A SENTENCE....................

§1. general remarks..........................................................................................................................................................

§2. Dialogues.........................................................................................................................................................................

§3. Communicative part...................................................................................................................................................

§4. Utterances and texts................................................................................................................................................

illocution...............................................................................................................................................................................

Proposition component...................................................................................................................................................

PART II..........................................................................................................................................................................................

Chapter III. Syntax............................................................................................................................................................

§1. Sentence. Definition...................................................................................................................................................

§2. Structural Types of Sentences.............................................................................................................................

§3. Communicative types of sentences......................................................................................................................

§4. Functional sentence perspective.........................................................................................................................

§5. The formal structure of sentences....................................................................................................................

Subject.................................................................................................................................................................................

Object...................................................................................................................................................................................

Attribute...............................................................................................................................................................................

Adverbial modifier.............................................................................................................................................................

Other members of the sentence..................................................................................................................................

§6 Phrases and forms of word connections............................................................................................................

CHAPTER IV SEMANTIC SYNTAX.....................................................................................................................................

§1. General remarks..........................................................................................................................................................

§2 Members of the sentence as semantic description of a sentence...........................................................

§3 Valence Theory.............................................................................................................................................................

§4. Generative syntax......................................................................................................................................................

§5. Deep Case Theory.........................................................................................................................................................

§6 Compositional Syntax................................................................................................................................................

PART III.........................................................................................................................................................................................

 

 

PART I

Chapter 1. General Notions of Grammar

GRAMMAR IN LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR IN KNOWLEDGE

Since the latter depends on the former it is necessary to find what part of the language structure can be called Grammar. Initially the term Grammar was used to name the art of writing and reading(in… Even in this respect the term Grammar may have at least three possible interpretations. Some linguists oppose…

GRAMMAR AS KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE

As mentioned above traditionally the study named Grammar covers all spheres of Language not included into Lexicology, Phonetics and Stylistics. It… Some phonetical features such as intonational pattern representing different… At the same time the units large than the sentence may have their formal oppositions reflecting certain meaningful…

VARIANTS OF GRAMMARS

There are two main purposes people describe the Grammar of a language. One type of descriptions is made to understand it, and the other is made to… When people use a Grammar to learn or to teach a language they expect that it… Because such Grammars suggest rules they are known as prescriptive Grammars. Of course they are based on the material…

TYPES OF GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS

To do so we are to find those features that might give us lead to the underlying grammatical system. These features should be a generalised… The syntagmatic relations depend on the speech, the paradigmatic relations… We may start with collecting information about syntagmatic features, that is about the positions units may occupy in…

DISTRIBUTIONAL GRAMMAR. SEGMENTATION PROCEDURES

The first procedure (which in fact the first in all types of analysis) is segmenting speech into units within the framework of the distributional… The use of this procedure may be of two variants. The first variant utilises the fact that the smallest grammatically relevant units - morphs - can be substituted by…

DISTRIBUTIONAL GRAMMAR. BASIC NOTIONS.

a) identifying environments; b) arranging distribution; c) comparing distributions o units.

DISTRIBUTIONAL GRAMMAR. IMMEDIATE CONSTITUENTS

The IC procedure is applied to strings of smaller units, morphemes or words, which is by itself a larger unit, a word or a sentence respectively.… To illustrate the operation of the IC analysis we shall take a simple English…

He sat looking at the silent telephone.

The first division should be placed after He. So we receive two constituents of the first level: He and sat looking at the silent telephone. The… S NP VP

TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. BASIC NOTIONS.

The simplest syntactical structures are called the kernel structures or deep structures, though the term "deep structure" is not exact,… Changes of the kernel structures or transformations can be divided into two… The transformations of the first group can be exemplified in the following way:

TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. ANALYTIC PROCEDURES

The analysis can proceed either from a set of kernel structures and develop them to the sentence which is analysed. The analysis can also proceed… We can take for illustrating both ways of analysis the sentence "Riccardo… A.From kernel structures to the sentence.

Riccardo)—((was)—((a LITTLE)<— (surprised)))—(at))—>((their)—>((keeping)—>((the)—((whole)<—((committee)—(waiting)))))—>((to look)—>((at)—>((a)—((strolling)<—((company)—>((of)—> (mountebacks))))))))))).

Then we should start with the last not yet ultimate constituent that is a constituent which consists of two ultimate constituents and check if it can be a result of some transformation.

The first group of constituents which can be suspected as being a result of transformation is — ((company)—>((of)—> (mountebacks)))<—(company consisted of mountebacks). But we have to reject it because it presupposes deletion of a lexical element. The first group which resulted of a transformation is: ((a)—((strolling)<—((company)—>((of)—> (mountebacks))))<— (a company of mountebacks strolled). The transformations employed here are described in the paragraphs above, they are Nominalisation of the clause by Adjectivisation of its predicate. To receive a clause out of a phrase we should use the same operations in the reverted order: for transition from (a company of mountebacks strolled) to ((a)—((strolling)<—((company)—>((of)—> (mountebacks)))) we used substitution of grammatical features of (stroll) and then permutation, while for transition from ((a)—((strolling)<—((company)—>((of)—> (mountebacks)))) to (a company of mountebacks strolled) we used permutation and then substitution of grammatical features of (stroll). This shows that transformations are a two-way procedures, that is transforming A into B means that it is possible to transform B into A, as it was illustrated by transformations of (a company of mountebacks strolled) and ((a)—((strolling)<—((company)—>((of)—> (mountebacks))))).

The next structure that may be a result of a transformation is: ((to look)—>((at)—>((a)—((strolling)<—((company)—>((of)—> (mountebacks))))))). Because a constituent of this structure is a transformation of a clause we can substitute it this part with its kernel structure: ((to look)—>((at)—>((a)— (company))—>((of)—> (mountebacks)))—(strolled)))). To make further presentation shorter we may symbolise it with Cl¹ and put it in brackets: ((to look)—>((at)—>[Cl¹])). Yet we should remember that Cl¹ = (a company of mountebacks strolled). The verbal form "to look" suggests that the whole structure is a transformed clause. The inconvenient feature in this case is that the NP constituent of the possible clause cannot to be found in the closest vicinity. It might be either an indefinite performer, or it can be deleted because its (the subject's name) can be used elsewhere before. So we can insert an unidentified element in the place of that NP: ((to look)—>((at)—>[Cl¹]))—>(X looked—>(at))—>[Cl¹])). In this case we also can use a generalised symbol for a clause and remember that Cl² = (X looked—>(at)). So the result is: (Cl²—>Cl¹).

The structure we have just discussed is a constituent of a larger structure: ((their)—>((keeping)—>((the)—((whole)<—((committee)—(waiting)))))—> (Cl²—>Cl¹). But the other constituent of the structure is a complex one. It consists of constituents of several levels of dependence. The smallest group that may be the result of kernel structure modification is: ((the)—((whole)<—((committee)—(waiting)))). Using substitution of the morphological features of "waiting" we receive a new clause: (the—whole<—committee—waited). As before we shall use a symbol for it: Cl³, remembering that Cl³ = (the—whole<—committee—waited) and receive the following sequence: ((their)—>((keeping)—>[Cl³]))—> ([Cl²]—>[Cl¹]). The next constituent in the group: ((their)—>(keeping)) is also a transformed clause: "they kept", received by morphological substitution. It should be symbolised as Cl⁴ = ((they)—(kept)). It is important that the relations of constituent in the initial structure and its transform changed: in the initial structure the constituent (their) depends upon the constituent (waiting) and the whole structure is endocentric, while in the transform the constituent are independent and the structure is exocentric. Using the symbols we receive the sequence: (([Cl⁴]—>[Cl³])—> ([Cl²]—>[Cl¹]))..

The sequence (([Cl⁴]—>[Cl³])—> ([Cl²]—>[Cl¹])) is a constituent of VI of the sentence and it means that we have reached the end of the analysis and can represent the deep structure of the sentence: ([Cl⁵] —>(([Cl⁴]—>[Cl³])—> ([Cl²]—>[Cl¹])). Now we can recall what are Cl^x symbols and make the lexical substitution. The result of this coincides with the result of the first type of transformational analysis; ((Riccardo)—((was)—((a LITTLE)<— (surprised)))—(at))—>((their)—>((keeping)—>((the)—((whole)<—((committee)—(waiting)))))—>((to look)—>((at)—>((a)—((strolling)<—((company)—>((of)—> (mountebacks))))))))))).

In the conclusion of the sections dealing with the transformational (generative) analysis it is necessary to say that the analysis itself only provides the analyst with a certain way of arrangement of material and with some information interpretation of which might give us a possibility to understand the Grammar of a language. The same can be said about other type of analysis described above. These modes of analysis (distributional, IC and transformational) were presented here as naturally supplementing each other. Historically it is really so. But in fact they are so intrinsically tied together. Distributional analysis may be used for traditional units (such as word forms or members of the sentence). Immediate constituent analysis can be applied not only to distributional classes but to any syntactical structure however the elements of it be named. The same is true for the transformational(generative) analysis.

Yet each of these analytic procedures has its own field a sphere of language in which its use yields more valuable information. The distributional analysis is better when analysing words and their forms. The immediate constituents analysis is best if applied to phrases. The transformational analysis can be considered as if specially designed for sentences. Still the data provided by them demands interpretation. But there is a model of description of languages in which interpretation go first and the analytic procedures are employ to prove or to reject a certain hypothetical interpretation. This us the Categorial Grammar.

CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. GRAMMATICAL MEANING

The first notion is grammatical meaning. A grammatical meaning differs from any other sort of meaning in four features: ÞA GRAMMATICAL MEANING IS OPPOSITIVE. Oppositive character of grammatical meaning is evident in the fact that any grammatical meaning is not only revealed…

CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. OPPOSITIONS.

Grammar is based on oppositions. For their description see G.S.Prokopchuk Lectures in Theoretical Grammar

CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. CATEGORIES.

This definition makes it possible to describe specific features by which we can recognise it. A.I. Snirnitsky describes them in the following way: … 1) Every grammatical category must be represented not less than by two forms.… 2) Not a single categorial form can be found in all forms of a unit, because it must be opposed at least to one other…

CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. PARADIGMS

As it was mentioned in§12 a form of a unit may represent several category forms of different grammatical categories. It means that a form may be a member of several grammatical categories. But each grammatical category must have at least two forms. Each grammatical category is a grammatical meaning and as such is dependent on the referential meaning of the unit. Since the grammatical categories cannot exist without connection with a certain unit, all of them have to modify the unit to produce their form. All the forms which are necessary to represent grammatical categories of a unit make up its paradigm. Since grammatical categories are obligatory this set of forms should be found with each element of the class to which the unit belongs.

STRATIFICATION OF LANGUAGE

Solution of the problem depends on how we answer another question: What is Language? We shall not now discuss it because this question was discussed… The units and their functions which we have just listed constitute levels of… Since Grammar presupposes unity of form and meaning it can start with morphs and morphemes and spread up to the…

CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. DIVISION OF GRAMMAR

The other two levels united under one heading are those of sentences and members of sentences (phrases). This part of Grammar is known as Syntax.… The other three levels (utterance, communicative part, dialogue) are usually… This traditional division of Grammar in two parts, Morphology and Syntax is based on units described. It is done on…

CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. MORPHOLOGY

You know since your school years that morphology studies words. It is true. But this is not the whole truth. Morphology, when translated from Greek,… This definition permits us to calculate those elements that are to discussed… The units Morphology deals with are words, morphemes, forms of words, grammatical categories of words and categorial…

CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. SYNTAX

The units which are explored with the syntactical methods is Sentence. You know it from school. And it is true, and even more than true, because, as…

MORPHOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY

Forms of words might differ, first of all, in the number of categorial forms they express the difference might be from one to as many categorial… Morphemes, besides, might differ in the number of morphs they use for their… Morphs also differ in the ability to represent different morphemes. There are morphs representing only one morpheme as…

SYNTACTICAL TYPOLOGY

Sentences might be differentiated according to the form of the main element of the sentence and, namely, the logical subject. If the form of the… Phrases are differentiated according to the syntactical relations existing…

UNITS LARGER THAN A SENTENCE

CHAPTER II. SOME GRAMMATICAL FEATURES OF UNITS LARGER THAN A SENTENCE.

General remarks.

For long relations between units of different levels were compared to those existing in a building: the smaller units were compared to bricks, the… For that we should find what are the elements of the units composed of. If we… a) a unit is a repetition of components only;

Dialogues

A. Jane, (my watch’s stopped. )Don’t you know what’s the time now? B. I guess, John, it’s half past seven. A. Thanks.

Communicative part

Pragmatic analysis in this sphere produced at least three descriptive theories. Two of them are known as principles of communication and describe… The first principle of communication is known as the Principle of… 1. Maxim of Quality that demands that one must not tell lies.

Utterances and texts

The informative function of the utterance has two aspects. As J.Austin stated in his lectures published in 1962 every utterance should inform the partner about the intention of the speaker and about some facts, about some fragment of the actual life as we imagine it.

The first aspect, the aspect informing about the speakers intentions was call the illocutionary component and the latter one, informing about the world, is know as the propositional component. These plus performance of the utterance (known as locution) and the expected (by the speaker) response of the partner (known as perlocution) compose an utterance as a speech act.

Illocution

Unfortunately, the structure of features of utterances that show illocutionary meanings are not yet described systematically and the reply can… It was found that the number of illocutions is very great, J.Austin himself… Directives comprise such speech acts as order, demand, request, pleading, moreover, they also include speech acts that…

Proposition component

The propositional component of an utterance reflects some fragment of the worlds as the speaker understands it. It may consist of one sentence or of a group of connected sentences. In the latter case the utterance has a structure which is described as a text.

PART II

Chapter III. Syntax.

Sentence. Definition.

The function of the sentence is to model some fragment of the world. This model should be referred to the original, to a fragment of the world. It…

Structural Types of Sentences.

In English and as much as we know in other languages no structure is found in which the three features of predicativity are embodied in three… In case of two-member sentences the elements formalising the features of… But a sentence may include either one predicativity centre or several. If a sentence has only one predicativity centre…

Communicative types of sentences

1) John will come tomorrow> 2) Will John come tomorrow?> 3) Come tomorrow, John!

Functional sentence perspective

 

The formal structure of sentences

The other elements of the sentence should be subordinated to these two main elements and are differentiated according to the grammatical class of… Simple as the procedure seems it rather often produces confusing results. If… These three methods of identifying the structure of the sentence cannot give absolutely non-ambiguous results and we…

Subject

The meaning of the subject presents more problems than its form. We expect that the subject should indicate the doer of the action or at least the… We have to mention here that as the result of its fixed position the subject… These characteristics of the subject indicate that the meaning of the subject results from the structural features of…

Object

The object in English seems to be one of the most difficult problems. The difficulty is in the fact that English objects have no special forms to indicate their function. The only formal feature is the position of the element functioning as an object. But even this might be ambiguous because in the position after the predicate we can observe elements that are traditionally treated as adverbial modifiers. Some of them behave as direct objects: John slept in his bed—> His bed was slept in.

We can treat objects either from their formal features or from the semantic relations existing between the verb and the object. From the formal point of view we may differentiate between objects and adverbial modifiers. The difference is that objects can not change their position in the sentence while adverbial modifiers are movable ***. Further division is within the objects. We can divide objects according to presence or absence of a preposition into non-prepositional and prepositional objects. Semantically objects might be divided taking into consideration the meaningful relation of the object and the predicate. Here we have to pay attention to the role which the nominal element plays in the activity named by the verb. This criterion appears to be rather subjective because it depends upon the attitude of the person who classifies the objects to the degree of detalization relevant for the syntactical structure. For example, in the sentence John gave Mary a watch The objects Mary and a watch might be treated as two direct objects because both of them are involved in the activity of giving and both might become subjects of passive constructions. But we can see that the manner of involvement of these two objects is different: a watch is something that is transferred by the subject to Mary and is absolutely inactive. Mary is the receiver of this inactive object and exhibits certain activity because she takes it and on this ground can be named the addressee of the activity. The semantic difference of these objects has some formal support. If we change the places of these words a preposition appears before Mary: John gave a watch to Mary. Besides passive transformations are also different. If Mary becomes the subject of the passive construction a watch is not changed (Mary was given a watch). If a watch becomes the subject, Mary acquires a preposition (A watch was given to Mary).

All this shows that semantic classification of elements occupying formal positions of objects demand special treatment and perhaps will yield not a simple yes or no answer. We shall discuss it in the section dealing with the semantics of the sentence.

Attribute

We have to note that the place before a noun seems to be a positional neutralisation of all differences between parts of speech because any element… Semantically and functionally all attributes might be divided into those which… The difference between these two types of attributes is supported by their transformational potentials. The…

Adverbial modifier

The adverbial modifies of manner or degree permit another type of transformation. The adverbial modifies of this type formed by adverbs with the…

Other members of the sentence

 

Phrases and forms of word connections

There are two classes of formal indication of word relations: positional and morphological. Their names show which technique is employed to bind… Morphological indicators use forms of words in two ways. The forms of two or… The other type of morphological indication of syntactical connection of words can be described as follows: one of the…

CHAPTER IV SEMANTIC SYNTAX

General remarks

Members of the sentence as semantic description of a sentence

We find this logical influence in the definition of the subject and the predicate we know from school. The subject was defined as the thing spoken… We may say that method appears to be inconsistent and very often produces…

Valence Theory

Lucien Tesniйre insisted that valence of verbs may vary from zero to three. So we may have four types of verbs and four semantic types of… Verbs with zero valence usually name natural phenomena like It snows, It is… One valence verbs usually name states, processes or general activity, as John is clever, A candle burns, A dog runs,…

Generative syntax

Only several words can be said about semantic syntax in Standard Generative Theory, because N.Chomsky postulated that the kernel structures are abstract and are semantic constructions of immediate constituents. Meanings of sentences are imported through Lexicon, i.e. thruogh words, taking certain positions as ultimate constituents before performance, it means before the sentence acquires its phonetical form.

Still we may speak about some semantic overtones even in the Standard Theory. It is generally assumed that structures having similar transformational histories are also similar semantically.

As a result we may say that transformations can be used as a good criterion for grouping syntactic structures having similar meanings or dividing syntactical structures into groups having different meanings.

Deep Case Theory

The main idea of the Deep Case Grammar is that each verb has a specific set of functional positions for nouns. This set is called a frame and the… We can not but recognise that this description of sentence meaning is very… We can see that this short description of the Deep Case Theory shows that it derives the meanings of the whole…

Compositional Syntax

This theoretical framework is an attempt to develop a united theory of Syntax. The presentation of the semantics of the sentence is based on several… 1.The semantic sphere of any sign is devided into the significational and the… 2.Because a sentence is a model of some fragment of the outer world its semantics is nesseceraly a construction, which…