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LECTURE 3. GRAMMATICAL MEANING. GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES.
1. The grammatical meaning of words.
2. Grammar category as the synthesis of grammar meaning and grammar form.
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1. The grammatical meaning of words.
Thus the grammatical meaning is the generalizing meaning of words, comprising them into one and the same class, i.e. names of objects and substances for nouns, names of actions for verbs, names of quality for adjective and so on. Grammatical meanings are not named. They are expressed by means of grammatical forms such as suffixes and inflexions. In grammatical meaning of number of nouns in English is expressed by the absence of the plural ending in singular and by the presence of –s or –es in plural. If we compare such word forms as boys, tables we notice at once that though denoting quite different objects of reality they have something in common. The common element is the grammatical meaning of plurality, which is expressed by the inflexion –s . To the form of words belongs not only suffixes or prefixes, stress and affixes but also forms of the verbs expressed by modal, auxiliary verbs as well. We mean the formation of continuous aspect and the perfect tense of the verbs (to be, to have, shall, will).
Grammatical meanings characterize what class the words belong to: case and number are the characteristic feature of nouns; degrees of comparison – adjectives, adverbs; tense, voice, mood, person and number – verbs. With the help of grammatical meanings expressed by different grammatical forms, the syntactical relations between words are revealed.
2. Grammar category as the synthesis of grammar meaning and grammar form.
Grammatical category is a class of units (such as noun and verb) or features (such as number and case) that share a common set of grammatical properties.
Grammatical category is a linguistic category which has the effect of modifying the forms of some class of words in a language. The words of everyday language are divided up into several word classes, or parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives. It often happens that the words in a given class exhibit two or more forms used in somewhat different grammatical circumstances. In each such case, this variation in form is required by the presence in the language of one or more grammatical categories applying to that class of words.
English nouns are affected by only one grammatical category, that of number: we have singular dog but plural dogs, and so on for most (but not all) of the nouns in the language. These forms are not interchangeable, and each must be used always and only in specified grammatical circumstances. And here is a key point: we must always use a noun in either its singular form or its plural form, even when the choice seems irrelevant; there is no possibility of avoiding the choice, and there is no third form which is not marked one way or the other. This is typically the case with grammatical categories.
It is important to keep in mind that a grammatical category is a linguistic, not a real-world, category, and that there is not always a one-to-one correspondence between the two, though they are usually closely related. For example 'tense' is a linguistic category, while 'time' is a category of the world. While past tense usually expresses past time (as in I saw a movie last night), the past-tense auxiliary in the following expresses future time: I wish you would go. And the present-tense verb of I leave tomorrow expresses future time.
Words are assigned to grammatical categories in traditional grammar on the basis of their shared semantic, morphological and syntactic properties. The kind of semantic criteria (sometimes called 'notional' criteria) used to categorise words in traditional grammar are illustrated in much-simplified form below:
Verbs denote actions (go, destroy, buy, eat etc.)
Nouns denote entities (car, cat, hill, John etc.)
Adjectives denote states (ill, happy, rich etc.)
Adverbs denote manner (badly, slowly, painfully, cynically etc.)
Prepositions denote location (under, over, outside, in, on etc.)
However, semantically based criteria for identifying categories must be used with care: for example, assassination denotes an action but is a noun, not a verb; illness denotes a state but is a noun, not an adjective; . . . and Cambridge denotes a location but is a noun, not a preposition."
Notional words, first of all verbs and nouns, possess some morphemic features expressing grammatical (morphological ) meanings. These features determine the grammatical form of the word.
Grammatical meanings are very abstract, very general. Therefore the grammatical form is not confined to an individual word, but unites a whole class of words, so that each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its individual, concrete semantics.
For instance, the meaning of the substantive plural is rendered by the regular plural suffix –(e)s, and in some cases by other, more specific means, such as phonemic interchange and a few lexeme-bound suffixes. Due to the generalized character of the plural, we say that different groups of nouns “take” this form with strictly defined variations in the mode of expression, the variations being of more systematic and less systemic nature.
3. Word classes.
The whole lexicon of English language, as all Indo-European languages, is divided into certain lexico-grammatical classes, which are traditionally called parts of speech. It should be noted that the term “parts of speech” is purely traditional and conventional, it can’t be taken as defining or explanatory. This name was introduced in the grammatical teaching of Ancient Greece. The existence of such classes doesn’t cause any hesitation with the linguists though the number of them is various with different scholars.
The main principles of these division into classes, existed for a long while, were explicitly formulated by L.V. Sherba; they are – the lexical meaning, morphological meaning and syntactical function. So, we can speak here about three criteria: “semantic”, “formal”, and “functional”. The semantic criterion presuppose the evaluation of the generalized meaning, which is characteristic of all the subsets of words constituting a given part of speech. This meaning is understood as the “categorial meaning of the part of speech”. The formal criterion provides for the exposition of the specific inflexional and derivational (word-building) features of all the lexemic subsets of a part of speech. The functional criterion concerns the syntactic role of words in the sentence typical of a part of speech. The said three factors of categorical characterization of words are conventionally referred to as, respectively, “meaning”, “form”, and “function”.
4. The parts of speech problem.
The parts of speech are classes of words, all the members of these classes having certain characteristics in common which distinguish them from the members of other classes. The problem of word classification into parts of speech still remains one of the most controversial problems in modern linguistics. The attitude of grammarians with regard to parts of speech and the basis of their classification varied a good deal at different times. Only in English grammarians have been vacillating between 3 and 13 parts of speech. There are four approaches to the problem:
The classical parts of speech theory goes back to ancient times. It is based on Latin grammar. According to the Latin classification of the parts of speech all words were divided dichotomically into declinable and indeclinable parts of speech. This system was reproduced in the earliest English grammars. The first of these groups, declinable words, included nouns, pronouns, verbs and participles, the second – indeclinable words – adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections. The logical-inflectional classification is quite successful for Latin or other languages with developed morphology and synthetic paradigms but it cannot be applied to the English language because the principle of declinability/indeclinability is not relevant for analytical languages.
A new approach to the problem was introduced in the XIX century by Henry Sweet. He took into account the peculiarities of the English language. This approach may be defined as functional. He resorted to the functional features of words and singled out nominative units and particles. To nominative parts of speech belonged noun-words (noun, noun-pronoun, noun-numeral, infinitive, gerund), adjective-words (adjective, adjective-pronoun, adjective-numeral, participles), verb (finite verb, verbals – gerund, infinitive, participles), while adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection belonged to the group of particles. However, though the criterion for classification was functional, Henry Sweet failed to break the tradition and classified words into those having morphological forms and lacking morphological forms, in other words, declinable and indeclinable.
A distributional approach to the parts of speech classification can be illustrated by the classification introduced by Charles Fries. He wanted to avoid the traditional terminology and establish a classification of words based on distributive analysis, that is, the ability of words to combine with other words of different types. At the same time, the lexical meaning of words was not taken into account. According to Charles Fries, the words in such sentences as 1. Woggles ugged diggles; 2. Uggs woggled diggs; and 3. Woggs diggled uggles. are quite evident structural signals, their position and combinability are enough to classify them into three word-classes. In this way, he introduced four major classes of words and 15 form-classes. Let us see how it worked. Three test frames formed the basis for his analysis:
Frame A - The concert was good (always);
Frame B - The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly);
Frame C – The team went there.
It turned out that his four classes of words were practically the same as traditional nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. What is really valuable in Charles Fries’ classification is his investigation of 15 groups of function words (form-classes) because he was the first linguist to pay attention to some of their peculiarities.
All the classifications mentioned above appear to be one-sided because parts of speech are discriminated on the basis of only one aspect of the word: either its meaning or its form, or its function.
In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated according to three criteria: semantic, formal and functional. This approach may be defined as complex. The semantic criterion presupposes the grammatical meaning of the whole class of words (general grammatical meaning). The formal criterion reveals paradigmatic properties: relevant grammatical categories, the form of the words, their specific inflectional and derivational features. The functional criterion concerns the syntactic function of words in the sentence and their combinability. Thus, when characterizing any part of speech we are to describe: a) its semantics; b) its morphological features; c) its syntactic peculiarities.
The linguistic evidence drawn from our grammatical study makes it possible to divide all the words of the language into:
It is commonly recognized that the notional parts of speech are nouns, pronouns, numerals, verbs, adjectives, adverbs; the functional parts of speech are articles, particles, prepositions, conjunctions and modal words.
The division of language units into notion and function words reveals the interrelation of lexical and grammatical types of meaning. In notional words the lexical meaning is predominant. In function words the grammatical meaning dominates over the lexical one. However, in actual speech the border line between notional and function words is not always clear cut. Some notional words develop the meanings peculiar to function words - e.g. seminotional words – to turn, to get, etc.
Notional words constitute the bulk of the existing word stock while function words constitute a smaller group of words. Although the number of function words is limited (there are only about 50 of them in Modern English), they are the most frequently used units.
Generally speaking, the problem of words’ classification into parts of speech is far from being solved. Some words cannot find their proper place. The most striking example here is the class of adverbs. Some language analysts call it a ragbag, a dustbin (Frank Palmer), Russian academician V.V.Vinogradov defined the class of adverbs in the Russian language as мусорная куча. It can be explained by the fact that to the class of adverbs belong those words that cannot find their place anywhere else. At the same time, there are no grounds for grouping them together either. Compare: perfectly (She speaks English perfectly) and again (He is here again). Examples are numerous (all temporals). There are some words that do not belong anywhere - e.g. after all. Speaking about after all it should be mentioned that this unit is quite often used by native speakers, and practically never by our students. Some more striking examples: anyway, actually, in fact. The problem is that if these words belong nowhere, there is no place for them in the system of words, then how can we use them correctly? What makes things worse is the fact that these words are devoid of nominative power, and they have no direct equivalents in the Russian or Kazakh languages. Meanwhile, native speakers use these words subconsciously, without realizing how they work.
QUESTIONS FOR THE SEMINAR