CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. GRAMMATICAL MEANING - раздел Философия, Lectures in Theory of ENGLISH Grammar In §1 We Found That That Grammar Is A System In Language Which Presents Meani...
In §1 we found that that grammar is a system in language which presents meaning through opposition of variants of units. This idea is the basic statement which makes it possible to deduce a great numbers other statements describing already particular features of Grammar of different languages including English. But to understand these statements we should know the meaning of words (or terms) used in them. Those terms are names of the basic notions of this kind of describing Grammar.
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 through opposition but cannot simply exist outside of it. If we take such English forms as "must", "ought (to)", "should". "would" or even "could" and "might" we can see that these forms in spite of clear indications of the Past[1] do not actually possess this meaning. Yet due to the feature "obligatory" these forms are treated as ... Present. Adjectives in all Germanic languages but English have the meanings of Gender and Number. English having no forms which can be opposed on these features has none of them. Being oppositive grammatical meanings are relative, which means that they are determined by the system of oppositions in which they are found. We know that some actions which in East Slavonic languages are represented as Past in English are treated as Present: "Я забыл, как егео зовут" — "I forget his name" or "Я только что узнал, что ..." — "I have just learned that ...". The difference is due to the difference in the system of verbal forms reflecting temporal relations: the Russian Perfective Aspect is opposed to the Imperfective as indicating a completed action, while the English Perfect Order is Opposed to the Indefinite as indicating a prior action. The result is evident — the Russian Perfect cannot be connected with the meaning of the Present Tense, while the English Perfect Order can. The outcome of it is that some states represented as actions in Russian have to be in the Past (since the states are results of completed actions), and in English they can be used in the Present tense if the actions and the resulting states coincide or are important at the moment of speaking.
ÞA GRAMMATICAL MEANING IS DEPENDENT.
Dependence of grammatical meanings means that they always accompany some other meanings. Most evident is the fact in the morphological meaning: the grammatical meaning of Number cannot be found in English without a Noun; the grammatical meaning of the Superlative Degree cannot be used without an Adjective. But the same is true for the syntactical grammatical meanings — the grammatical meaning of interrogation cannot be seen without the referential meaning of the sentence used in the interrogative form. More to it: other, most often lexical meaning can modify the grammatical meaning of the form or forbid its use at all: the form of the Continuos Aspect if the verb "to jump" means {repetition}, but not {limited duration} as the form is expected to mean; the transitive verb "to have" does not permit the Passive form.
ÞA GRAMMATICAL MEANING IS ABSTRACT.
Grammatical meanings are abstract because they do not actually depend upon meaningful features they represent. It follows from the oppositive nature of grammatical meaning — the meaning appears not due to direct reference to the outer phenomena but it is connected with them through opposition, through the meaning of other forms composing the opposition.
ÞA GRAMMATICAL MEANING IS OBLIGATORY.
This feature means that a grammatical meaning determines its importance for the system of Language. This feature demands that if the meaning is grammatical then this meaning or its opposite must be found with all units of the class. We have already met the influence of this feature when discussing the modal verbs. Another example: all nouns a meaning of Number. The majority have singular or plural as the form can be, but those that have only one form have either singular or plural but still a meaning of Number. The other reflection of this feature is that the meaning is used even if it is in any other, non-grammatical way: "four birds, "four" already indicates plurality, and still the noun is used in the plural indicating this meaning once more.
Lectures in Theory of ENGLISH Grammar... PART Chapter General Notions of Grammar...
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CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. GRAMMATICAL MEANING
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GRAMMAR IN LANGUAGE AND GRAMMAR IN KNOWLEDGE
When asked what is Grammar, people usually say that it is a set of rules for correct use of words and making sentences. This definition may be accepted if we mean that Grammar is presentation of ou
GRAMMAR AS KNOWLEDGE OF LANGUAGE
In the previous section we found that Grammar as a part of Language is a system presenting meaning through oppositions of variant of units. In this section we shall try to define Grammar as a scien
VARIANTS OF GRAMMARS
Grammatical studies are usually done with a certain aim in mind, and grammatical descriptions vary with them.
There are two main purposes people describe the Grammar of a language. One typ
TYPES OF GRAMMATICAL ANALYSIS
As it was shown in §1, grammatical features are results of formal and meaningful oppositions of variants of units. But in actual speech we hear (or see) only one of the variants. It means that we h
DISTRIBUTIONAL GRAMMAR. SEGMENTATION PROCEDURES
In §4 we defined distributional Grammar as such description of a grammatical system which starts at the positional (syntagmatic) properties of units. In this section we shall discuss the procedures
DISTRIBUTIONAL GRAMMAR. BASIC NOTIONS.
What has been described is only prerequisite of the analysis. The analysis proper of three steps:
a) identifying environments;
b) arranging distribution;
c) comparing dis
DISTRIBUTIONAL GRAMMAR. IMMEDIATE CONSTITUENTS
Distributional analysis does not usually stop here, but endeavours to discover relations of units within the frame of the larger ones. The methods used at this step is known as IMMEDIATE
He sat looking at the silent telephone.
A)The splitting procedure
The first division should be placed after He. So we receive two constituents of the first level: He and
TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. BASIC NOTIONS.
In §7 we found that analytical methods and procedures depend upon the idea of Language. One of the most popular images of Language is presenting it as a mechanism for creating, producing linguistic
TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR. ANALYTIC PROCEDURES
The aim of the transformational analysis is to discover how the sentence under analysis is generated. To achieve this objective we have to find the kernel structures which are the part of the deep
CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. CATEGORIES.
The notion of grammatical category has a great number of different definitions. And still in all of them the key words are general and obligatory. Keeping that in mind we should develop such defini
STRATIFICATION OF LANGUAGE
As we already know the Grammar of Language embraces all its levels and units. The problem here is: How many and what sorts of units must we recognise to be sure that our model of Language (=theory
CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. DIVISION OF GRAMMAR
As we saw in §14 Grammar may be spread to all types of units and units possess quite different functions and other features Grammar as a system of meaningful oppositions should also have properties
CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. MORPHOLOGY
As it was shown in§15 Morphology is to be defined in two ways: according to the units described in it and according to properties of the units.
You know since your school years that morpho
CATEGORIAL GRAMMAR. SYNTAX
As it was shown in§15 Syntax is to be defined in two ways: according to the units described in it and according to properties of the units.
The units which are explored with the syntactica
MORPHOLOGICAL TYPOLOGY
As it was shown in § 16 Morphology includes several types of units and two types of grammatical meanings which employ the units as their forms. Besides connection with grammatical meanings the unit
SYNTACTICAL TYPOLOGY
Syntax as a part of grammatical description covers not only grammatical features of sentences, but also their referential meaning (semantic syntax). As a result variants of syntactic units which co
UNITS LARGER THAN A SENTENCE
As we saw in §14, grammatical features may be found in the units larger than a sentence, namely, in the utterances, communicative parts and dialogues. But as we have already mentioned above, these
General remarks.
Traditionally units larger than a sentence are considered to be properties of Speech but not Language. The reason is that a unit of language must be a recurrent, that is repeated element. In this r
Dialogues
If we take the dialogue of the previous section and change its social setting we would receive quite a different structure. Let us see how the dialogue about finding out time can be formed in case
Communicative part
Communicative parts are seldom recognised as linguistic units. The reason is that dialogues or events of communication are usually divided into steps of communication comprising normally two or mor
Illocution
Illocution is what the speaker wants of his or her partner. It can be shown by the verbs that are caller performative. A performative verb is a verb in the form of the first person Present I
Sentence. Definition.
Before we start discussing grammatical features of sentences we have to define their specific property which differentiates them from other units. In the linguistic theory we can find a great numbe
Structural Types of Sentences.
Structural types of sentences depend upon the way the most important features of the sentence, and namely, predicativity, is reflected in their structure. Since predicativity has three features, th
Communicative types of sentences
The structural types of sentences described in the previous section do not have connections with any special meanings. Yet if we take a sentence and start changing its structure we may observe that
The formal structure of sentences
The formal structure might be presented in several ways. Some of them where described in Chapter One §§ 5-7. A sentence might be presented as a sequence of distributional classes of words. But this
Subject
We defined the subject as such element of a sentence that embodies the personal feature of the predicativity. But this definition does not show formal and semantic (referential) characteristics of
Attribute
Attributes were defined as elements of noun groups. Forms and compositions of adjectives are very variable. The variability of the form of the attribute to a large extent depends on the class of th
Adverbial modifier
The forms and semantic features of adverbial modifies are even more variable than those of attributes. The adverbial modifies might be composed of adverbs, prepositional phrases, verbals and verbal
Phrases and forms of word connections
The IC analysis splits a sentence into phrases that is groups of words connected together. The same groups are found in sentences if we use other types of syntactical analysis. The logical connecti
General remarks
The sentence was defined as a model of some fragment of the world. Besides it is a word or a group of words having predicativity. predicativity was defined as reference of the contents of the utter
Members of the sentence as semantic description of a sentence
The system of members of sentence was initially a syncretic description of form and meaning of elements of a sentence. The meaning of a sentence was identified with a logical union and namely the j
Valence Theory
There were many attempts to overcome inconsistencies of the method of members of sentence. One of the most systematic approaches is known as the valence theory. It is usually considered that the fo
Deep Case Theory
Transformational grammar was the starting point of a rather influentional theory of sentence meaning known as the Deep Case Theory or the Frame Theory. It should be immediately noted that this theo
Compositional Syntax
The concept named "Compositional Syntax" was first formulated and further developed in the Minsk State Linguistic University and more exactly at the department of History and Grammar of E
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