Theoretical Grammar Seminar

Topics: Grammar, Verb, Grammatical number Pages: 12 (3381 words) Published: October 8, 2013
﻿The Course of Theoretical Grammar

Seminar 1. Theoretical Grammar and its Subject. General Principles of the Grammar Analysis 1. The subject of theoretical grammar. The scope of linguistics. 2. The grammatical structure of the English language. Morphology and syntax as two main parts of grammar. 3. Language as a system and structure. The dichotomy of language and speech. Different approaches to the language study. 4. Characteristics of the language levels and their units.

5. Systemic relations in language.
6. Practical assignments.

Practical assignment 1

1. Choose the type of system relations the following units represent: he must have gone; a smart student; plays/is playing/played/will play; Mary was listening; writing and reading; a friend / the friend / father’s friend; you should have listened; tired but happy; he must be studying / He ought to be studying / He should be studying; seeing is believing.

2. In the following fragment indicate all possible syntagmatic relations and define their types. Comment on the possible paradigmatic relations and their types of the underlined units. My mother did nothing except stay beautiful; at thirty she still acted like the sixteen-year-old girl my father had eloped with. She listened to the Victrola, visited her girlfriends and went to the city, to the fancy department stores, to try on clothes. So my grandmother got down on her arthritic knees and scrubbed the floors. She did laundry, she cooked. Naturally, I worked alongside her. I guess I figured housework was something that skipped a generation. But once I finished high school and went to business, I wasn’t much of a help. My grandmother was really the housewife in her son’s home – which I guess made my mother. (Susan Isaacs. Shining Through)

3. Read the definitions of language cited below, think over the principles they are based on: a) Language is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols by means of which a social group cooperates (B.Bloch); b) A language is not an assemblage of unconnected patterns but a system which is integrated in a high degree (H.Gleason); c) Language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of a system of voluntary produced symbols (E.Sapir); d) Language is first and foremost a means of transmitting information, and its study is a branch of the study of the signs and objects that they symbolize. Language is also a form of social behaviour (J.Whatmough). The Course of Theoretical Grammar

Seminar 2. Lexical and Grammatical Aspects of the Word

1. Lexical and grammatical aspects of the word. Grammatical meaning of the word. 2. Grammatical categories. Referential and significational grammatical categories. Means of realization of grammatical categories. 3. The notion of opposition. Types of oppositions.

4. The morpheme as an elementary meaningful unit; its speech variants. 5. Classification of morphemes.
6. Practical assignments.

Practical assignment 2

1. What do we call analytical and synthetic grammatical forms of the word? Give your examples of synthetic and analytical forms in Modern English and Ukrainian/Russian.

2. Define the type of oppositions the categories of tense, voice, mood, number, case, degrees of comparison are based on in Modern English.

3. Provide various examples of the implicit dependent grammatical meaning you can think of.

4. Point out lexical, grammatical and word-building morphemes in the following words: breathing, he whispers, recovering, seizure, evidently, watchcat, lower, directions, teacher.

5. Point out free, bound, and semi-bound morphemes in the underlined words: Clutching his broken glasses to his face, Harry stared around. He had emerged into an alleyway that seemed to be made up entirely of shops devoted to the Dark Arts. The one he’d just left, Borgin and Burks, looked like the largest, but opposite was a nasty window display of shrunken heads and, two doors down, a...
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