Lecture 2 The main notions of Grammar

1. Language and speech.
Ferdinand de Saussure
Language
collective body of knowledge,
a set of basic elements,
a great variety of combinations of these elements,
these combinations are endless,
common for all individuals.
Speech
the result of using the language,
the result of a definite act of speaking,
individual, personal
Phoneme
Sound
sentence
utterance
text
discourse
the realization of language in actual use.

2. Systemic relations in language. Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic relations
Paradigmatic are relations based on the principles of similarity. They exist between the units that can substitute one another.
A BOTTLE OF MILK
jar, cup, glass Cola, wine, water
PR can be of three types: semantic, formal and functional.
Semantic PR are based on the similarity of meaning: a book to read = a book for reading. He used to practice English every day – He would practice English every day.
Formal PR are based on the similarity of forms. Such relations exist between the members of a paradigm: man – men; play – played – will play – is playing.
Functional PR are based on the similarity of function. They are established between the elements that can occur in the same position. For instance, noun determiners: a, the, this, his, Ann’s, some, each, etc.
PR are associated with the sphere of ‘language’.

Syntagmatic relations -
A BOTTLE OF MILK
with other units of the same level-
They can be of three different types: coordinate, subordinate and predicative.
Coordinate SR exist between the homogeneous linguistic units that are equal in rank, that is, they are the relations of independence: you and me; They were tired but happy.
Subordinate SR are the relations of dependence when one linguistic unit depends on the other: teach + er – morphological level; a smart student – word-group level; predicative and subordinate clauses – sentence level.
Predicative SR are the relations of interdependence: primary and secondary predication.
As mentioned above, SR may be observed in utterances, which is impossible when we deal with PR.

3. General characteristics of the grammatical structure of language
Indo-European languages
synthetic analytic
grammatical meanings and
grammatical relations of words
are expressed with the help of inflexions
(Russian, Latin, Polish, Lithuanian, German, Italian, etc).
grammatical meanings and grammatical forms are expressed with the help of words (will do)
(Mandarin Chinese, Afrikaans)

4. The notion of ‘grammatical meaning’
Lexical
individual meaning of the word (e.g. table -
it corresponds to a definite piece of furniture).
Grammatical
the meaning of the whole class or a subclass
Any noun has the grammatical meaning of thingness.
countableness.
verb has the grammatical meaning of verbiality – the ability to denote actions or states.
adjectives – qualitativeness – the ability to denote qualities

5. Grammatical categories.
Grammatical categories are made up by the unity of identical grammatical meanings that have the same form (e.g. singular::plural). Due to dialectal unity of language and thought, grammatical categories correlate, on the one hand, with the conceptual categories and, on the other hand,
the objective category of time finds its representation in the grammatical category of tense, the objective category of quantity finds its representation in the grammatical category of number. Those grammatical categories that have references in the objective reality are called referential grammatical categories.
The grammatical categories do not correspond to anything in the objective reality and correlate only with conceptual matters:
They are called significational categories. To this type belong the categories of mood and degree.

6. The notion of opposition
The relation between two grammatical forms differing in meaning and external signs is called opposition – book::books
Means of realization of grammatical categories may be synthetic (near – nearer) and analytic (beautiful – more beautiful).
Transposition and neutralization of morphological forms.
Transposition is the use of a linguistic unit in an unusual environment or in the function that is not characteristic of it (He is a lion).
Neutralization is the reduction of the opposition to one of its members : custom :: customs – x :: customs; x :: spectacles.

7. The Parts of Speech problem. Word classes
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.
4 approaches to the problem of classification:
Classical (logical-inflectional)
Functional
Distributional
Complex

Classical (logical-inflectional)
Declinable - nouns, pronouns, verbs and participles
indeclinable - adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions and interjections.
2. Functional
nominative parts of speech - noun-words (noun, noun-pronoun, noun-numeral, infinitive, gerund), adjective-words (adjective, adjective-pronoun, adjective-numeral, participles), verb (finite verb, verbals – gerund, infinitive, participles),
particles - adverb, preposition, conjunction and interjection
3. Distributional approach - the ability of words to combine with other words of different types
four major classes of words and 15 form-classes.

MODERN CLASSIFICATION
those denoting things, objects, notions, qualities, etc. – words with the corresponding references in the objective reality – notional words; (nouns, pronouns, numerals, verbs, adjectives, adverbs)
those having no references of their own in the objective reality; most of them are used only as grammatical means to form up and frame utterances – function words, or grammatical words. (articles, particles, prepositions, conjunctions and modal words.)