Grammar in the architecture of the english language. Parts of speech. Theme 2

1.

THEME 2
GRAMMAR IN THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE ENGLISH
LANGUAGE. PARTS OF SPEECH
1. Linguistic categories: lexical and grammatical
2. Levels of language structure and their units
2.1. Morphemic
2.2. Lexical
2.3. Syntactic
2.4. Textual
3. Parts of speech
3.1. Definition and criteria
3.2. Inventory of the parts of speech in English
3.3. Limitations to the traditional classification of English parts
of speech
3.4. Alternative approaches to the traditional classification of
English parts of speech (self-study: Manual, pp.23-25)

2.

1.1. Linguistic categories:
lexical and grammatical
• Our experience of the world –
‘a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions’
(Benjamin Whorf 1956:213)
• Conceptual categories - such notions which slice
our ideas of reality into large chunks.
• Verbalized categories (i.e. those captured by
linguistic signs) vs. ‘pure thoughts’
• Linguistic expressions help us to pick out the
events and states we want to talk about from this
continuous and complex stream of happenings.

3.

Conceptual categories
of material things
of abstract
entities

4.

Linguistic
categories
lexical
grammatical
(a) Look at that rain!
(b) It’s raining again!

5.

A grammatical category is a unity of form
and content:
- in its formal aspect, a grammatical category
is represented by an opposition (::) of the marked
and the unmarked members;
- the content of a grammatical category is
called grammatical meaning (e.g. plurality, tense,
degrees of comparison). Grammatical meanings are
shared by a great number of words.
The grammatical category is the main
element of the grammatical structure of a language.

6.

grammatical
categories
morphological
parts of
speech
their most
abstract
properties
(e.g. number, tense)
syntactic
phrasal
sentential

7.

2. LEVELS OF LANGUAGE STRUCTURE
AND THEIR UNITS
Levels of
Language
Structure
syntactic
Units of Language
(abstractions)
Units of Speech
(instantiations)
sentence type
sentence token
lexemic
word
word-form
morphemic
morpheme
morph
phonemic
phoneme
phone

8.

2.1. Morphemic level
The morpheme is a minimal meaningful unit
(L.Bloomfield)
morphemes
lexical / stem /
the base
derivational /
word-building
grammatical /
form-building /
inflexional

9.

Lexical / stem morphemes (= the base)
-
carry the main lexical meaning of the word;
can be free (вільні), i.e. can stand alone as words
(e.g. speak, brain, sharp; день, кінь, він) or bound
(зв'язані) (e.g. amicable, duration, probable,
звичний, тяжіння, цікавий)

10.

Derivational / word-building
morphemes
- serve to form new words
e.g. speaker, brainless, sharpen, знаний,
швидко, весілля

11.

Inflexional / form-building/
grammatical morphemes
serve to form grammatical forms of words (grammemes),
e.g. speaking, brains, sharper, кращим, стрибнув, речі;
are wide-range abstractions, e.g. –ed, -і/-и cover whole
subclasses of regular verbs or nouns;
always enter an opposition (marked::unmarked member),
i.e. opposed to some other morpheme (or its absence = the
“zero” morpheme) that expresses the same grammatical
category

12.

The morpheme is realized in speech as morphs.
Allomorphs are positional variants of a morpheme,
e.g.:
unnecessary, impossible, incomprehensible;
рік – року, друг – друзі

13.

Allomorphs stand in complementary distribution
to one another:
e.g.
irreproachable - unpredictable (lexical negation)
kids – cats – horses - children - sheep (plural)

14.

2.2. Lexical level
The word is the smallest naming unit of language.
Concept
Referent
Form
The Semantic Triangle of Ch. Ogden and A. Richards

15.

The information contained in a word is subdivided
into denotational (referential) and significative
(conceptual / categorical) meaning .
The referential meaning (rendered by lexical
morphemes) reflects the symbolic connection
established between a word and a certain fragment of
the extralinguistic world.
The conceptual meaning (mostly expressed by
derivational morphemes) reflects the way we categorize
the world in choosing a certain part of speech
e.g. white - whiteness - to whiten; білий – білизна –
білити

16.

A word also possesses a purely grammatical
meaning rendered by its inflexion (or lack of it,
i.e., a zero inflexion).
A word in a certain grammatical form,
signaled by the inflexion, is called the word-form,
or the grammeme.
The grammeme is a carrier of grammatical
information. It is not necessarily equivalent to a
word (as in stopped; зупинився) but can be
analytical, i.e., consist of more than one word
(e.g., has spoken; буде виступати).
The system of grammatical forms makes
the paradigm of the word.

17.

2.3. Syntactic level
Syntactic units:
- a word-group /word combination / phrase
- a sentence
- a sentence member
- a clause

18.

2.4. Textual level
Discourse – text in context

19.

3. PARTS OF SPEECH
Parts of speech - categories into which all words of a
language are classified.
3.1. Classification criteria
Parts of speech are characterized by:
- their abstract grammatical meaning;
- certain formal markers (= grammatical morphemes);
- certain functions in sentences.

20.

Each part of speech explains not what the
word denotes, but how the word is used:
(1) They heard high pitched cries in the middle of
the night.
(2) The baby cries all night long and all day long.
(3) Bosco showed up for work two hours late.
(4) He will have to work until midnight.

21.

The term “parts of speech” cannot be taken as in
any way explanatory. In Ancient Greece the concept of
the sentence was not sufficiently developed and thus
no distinction was made between language and speech.
Traditional grammars
parts of speech
Contemporary
grammars
(taxonomic) word class;
grammatical category

22.

Dionysius Thrax
authored the first Greek grammar
(“Tekhne grammatike” / “Art of Grammar”)
Born:
Birthplace:
Died:
170 BC
Alexandria, Egypt
90 BC

23.

To sum up, the part-of-speech criteria are:
- semantic (=meaning: the generalized meaning of
the part of speech and the meaning of its major
subsets);
- formal (=form: specific inflexional and wordbuilding features);
- functional (=function: the syntactic role in a
sentence).

24.

3.2. Inventory of the parts of speech
in the English language
8+1
- 6 notional: Nouns, Adjectives, Numerals, Pronouns,
Verbs, and Adverbs;
- 2 functional: Prepositions and Conjunctions;
- 1 suprasyntactic: Interjections.

25.

PART OF SPEECH
BASIC FUNCTION
EXAMPLES
Noun (іменник)
names a person, place, or thing
pirate, ship; мама, Україна
Pronoun
(займенник)
takes the place of a noun
I, you, he, she, it, ours, them, who;
ми, ніщо, будь-який, весь, той
Verb (Дієслово)
identifies action or state of being
Adjective
(прикметник)
Adverb
(прислівник)
modifies a noun
sing, dance, believe, be;
милуватися, замислюватися
hot, lazy, funny;
рідний, безмежний, батьків
softly, lazily, often;
весело, тут, вчора, на щастя
Numeral
(числівник)
Preposition
(прийменник)
Conjunction
(сполучник)
Interjection
(вигук)
modifies a verb, adjective, or another
adverb
identifies exact number of things
shows a relationship between a noun
(or a pronoun) and other words in a
sentence
joins words, phrases, and clauses
expresses emotion
one, first, thousand;
десять, шостий
up, over, against, by, for;
перед, над, поза
and, but, or, yet;
і, але, бо, як
ah, whoops, ouch;
ах, ох, алло, ура, бух

26.

Part of speech
Nouns
Verbs
Adjectives
Size
Rank
large: form
Notional
the predication the main ones:
of a sentence - fill in the main
positions
- cover 93% of
the lexicon
medium
Status
open
Adverbs
Pronouns
Notional
the minor ones
Synonymous terms
notional,
autonomous,
autosemantic,
content,
contentive,
lexical,
vocabulary,
full words
Numerals
Prepositions
small
Functional
closed
medium
Suprasyntactic
open
Conjunctions
Interjections
grammar, function,
functor, functional,
synsemantic,
syntagmatic,
empty, or form words
suprasyntactic

27.

3. LIMITATIONS TO THE TRADITIONAL CLASSIFICATION OF THE PARTS OF SPEECH
Definitions of the parts of speech: G. O. Curme “Parts of Speech and Accidence”,
Boston: Heath, 1935
A noun, or substantive, is a word used as a name of a living being or lifeless
thing: Mary, John, horse, cow; hat, house, tree, London, Chicago; virtue (p. 1);
• A pronoun is a word used instead of a noun (p. 7);
• The verb is that part of speech by which we make an assertion or ask a question:
The wind blows; Is the wind blowing?;
• An adjective is a word that modifies a noun or a pronoun, i.e. a word that is used
with a noun or pronoun to describe or point out the living being or lifeless thing
designated by the noun or pronoun: a little boy, that boy, this boy (p.42);
• An adverb is a word that modifies a verb, an adjective or another adverb (p.71);
• A preposition is a word that indicates a relation between the noun or pronoun it
governs and another word, which may be a verb, an adjective or another noun or
pronoun: I live in this house (p.87);
• A conjunction is a word that joins together sentences or parts of a sentence:
Sweep the floor and dust that furniture; He waited until I came (p.92);
• An interjection is an outcry to express pain, surprise, anger, pleasure, or some
other emotion, as Ouch!, Oh!, Alas!, Why! (p.105).

28.

- Instead of what nouns are the pronouns used in
the following sentences?
The boy said he was ill.
I am ill.
Nobody came.
Everything was destroyed.
What is the new teacher like?
It was John who broke the window.

29.

If an adjective is a word that ‘describes’
what is designated by a noun or pronoun,
why is it that in They are fools the word
fools is a noun, not an adjective (like
foolish in They are foolish?).
-

30.

If the point that part-of-speech definitions
provided by traditional grammars are not quite
adequate as language-particular definitions is
obvious to you now, find its further
demonstrations.

31.

To sum up,
traditional definitions of the parts of speech in English:
1) do not make reference to specific properties of English
and are applicable to other languages as well. They are
couched in terms of the meaning of the words to be
classified rather than their grammatical properties.

32.

2) are not all of the same kind: nouns and verbs are
defined independently of the others, while the
definitions given to pronouns, adjectives, adverbs
and prepositions refer to nouns and/or verbs. The
trouble with this is that the definitions are not
mutually exclusive, i.e. one part of speech is
defined with the help of another

33.

3) do not distinguish between central and more or less
marginal members, with the possibility of some
indeterminacy over just where the boundaries are. Yet
not all members of a part of speech are identical with
respect to their grammatical properties: there are
central , or prototypical , members of a part of speech
and marginal, or peripheral, members (PROJECT).

34.

Evaluation of the traditional theory of the parts of
speech as it applies to the grammar of English:
On the debit side:
On the credit side
• are not language-specific:
they classify meanings of
words rather than their
grammatical properties;
• are heterogeneous in their
nature and not mutually
exclusive;
• make no distinction
between the central and
marginal members of a part
of speech.
• it is inconceivable that one
might write a viable grammar
of English that failed to
distinguish nouns, adjectives,
verbs, etc.;
• it is clear that modifications
proposed have not achieved
majority acceptance among
modern grammarians;
• parts of speech are inevitable
to play a central role in the
organization and presentation
of grammar.

35.

3.4. ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES
TO TRADITIONAL CLASSIFICATION
OF ENGLISH PARTS OF SPEECH
projects
• Henry Sweet New English Grammar, Logical
and Historical (1891)
• Jens Otto Harry Jespersen The Philosophy of
Grammar (1924)
• Charles Fries The Structure of English (1952)