GRAMMATICAL MEANING.GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES.

The notion of ‘grammatical meaning’ Types of grammatical meaningGrammatical categories. The notion of opposition. Transposition and neutralization of morphological forms.

3 fundamental notions of grammar: grammatical form, grammatical meaning grammatical category

Word

is the main expressive unit of human language which ensures the thought-forming function of the language.

is also the basic nominative unit of language with the help of which the naming function of language is realized.

Word

is the main unit of traditional grammatical theory.

is a level unit. In the structure of language it belongs to the upper stage of the morphological level.

is a unit of the sphere of ‘language’ and it exists only through its speech actualization.

Characteristic features of the word

indivisibility

a bilateral entity

The notion of ‘grammatical meaning’

The word’s semantic structural

meanings

grammatical lexical

The semantic structure of the word

Lexical meaning is the individual meaning of the

word

Grammatical meaning is the meaning of the

whole class or a subclass.

The word “table”

Lexical meaning

Its individual lexical meaning

corresponds to a definite piece of

furniture

Grammatical meaning It’s the one of thingness

as the meaning of the whole class.

The noun ‘table’ has the grammatical meaning of a subclass – countableness.

A verb Verbiality – the ability

to denote actions or states. An adjective

Qualitativeness – the ability

to denote qualities. Adverbs

Adverbiality – the ability

to denote quality of qualities.

oats and wheat foliage and leaves hair and волосы

bull - cow author – authoress

pens –meaning of plurality; indicator – the morpheme

has been working – the grammatical form indicates continuity and perfection

‘s - The grammatical meaning is here motivated. It shows relations of objects in extra-linguistic world:

Peter’s head (part of a whole) Peter’s arrival (subjective Genitive relations) Peter’s arrest (objective Genitive relations)

does, larger, me

The book reads well. Reads – is read, read

– are read (the category of voice)

Types of grammatical meaning

GRAMMATICAL MEANING

EXPLICIT IMPLICIT

GENERAL DEPENDENT

Types of grammatical meaningExplicit

The explicit grammatical meaning is always marked morphologically – it has its marker. e.g. cats - the grammatical meaning of plurality is shown in the form of the noun with -s; cat’s – the grammatical meaning of possessiveness is shown by the form ‘s;is asked – shows the explicit grammatical meaning of passiveness.

Implicit The implicit

grammatical meaning is not expressed formally

e.g. the word table does not contain any hints in its form as to it being inanimate).

Types of the implicit grammatical meaning The general

grammatical meaning is the meaning of the whole word-class, of a part of speech

e.g. verbs – the general meaning of verbiability

nouns – the general grammatical meaning of thingness.

The dependent grammatical meaning is the meaning of a subclass within the same part of speech.

e.g. any verb possesses the dependent grammatical meaning of transitivity/intransitivity, terminativeness/non-terminativeness, stativeness/non-stativeness; nouns have the dependent grammatical meaning of contableness/uncountableness and animateness/inanimateness

The dependent grammatical meaning influences the realization of grammatical categories restricting them to a subclass.

e.g. the dependent grammatical meaning of countableness/uncountableness

influences the realization of the grammatical category of number

Different modes of expressing grammatical meaning inflexions (work-er-o – work-er-s). Homonymy

of grammatical morphemes (-ing – Gerund and Participle I); 

sound alternation ( man – men, have - has); analytical means (analytical forms). Prof.

Barkhudarov: analytical forms are always marked with the help of discontinuous morphemes (have+ -en; be + -ing; be + -en).

suppletivity (I – me, go – went, bad - worse).

Criteria to differentiate analytical forms:

The general grammatical meaning of an analytical form comprises all the components of the form. Each component taken separately doesn’t render any information about the general meaning of the form.

There are no syntactic relations between the components of an analytical form. Originally they developed from free syntactic combinations, mainly from some types of compound predicates.

Syntactic relations in the context are possible only for the whole form; the components can’t have syntactic relations separately: has never done.

Grammatical categories.

Grammatical category is a system of expressing a generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms.

The term ‘category’ derives from a Greek word which is otherwise translated as ’predication’ (in the logical, or philosophical, sense of ‘attributing properties’ to things).

Traditional categories are: the category of gender, number, person, case, tense, mood, voice.

Grammatical categories.Their characteristical features

A grammatical category is a set of syntactic features that

express meanings from the same conceptual domain

occur in contrast to each other, and are typically expressed in the same

fashion

Correlation of grammatical categories Objective reality Objective category

Conceptual reality Lingual reality Conceptual category Grammatical category

Due to dialectal unity of language and thought, grammatical categories correlate, on the one hand, with the conceptual categories and, on the other hand, with the objective reality.

Referential grammatical categories.

are those that have references in the objective reality

e.g.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.

Significational grammatical categories

are those that do not correspond to anything in the objective reality. Such categories correlate only with conceptual matters.

Conceptual correlate

Lingual correlate

The notion of opposition.

The relation between two grammatical forms differing in meaning and external signs is called opposition –

e.g. book::books

(unmarked member/marked member).

As all grammatical categories find their realization through oppositions, we may define

the grammatical category as the opposition between two mutually exclusive form-classes

a form-class is a set of words with the same explicit grammatical meaning.

Means of realization of grammatical categories

Means of GC realization

synthetic analytic

(near – nearer) (beautiful – more beautiful).

sound alteration

(sing-sang-sung)

suppletivity

(good-better)

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 .

e.g. He is a lion. He is coming tomorrow

Transposition and neutralization of morphological forms. Neutralization is the reduction of the

opposition to one of its members

e.g. custom :: customs – x :: customs;

x :: spectacles.

Unanswered questions concerning the role of grammatical category in

language processing What is the role of grammatical category in

lexical, phrasal, and sentential processing? How is grammatical category information

represented in the brain? Are there distinct neural substrates underlying

the representation of nouns and verbs - along semantic, grammatical, or lexical lines?

Are grammatical category effects due to an interaction of the internal structure of words and their processing implications?