THEORETICAL GRAMMAR

OF ENGLISH

Compiled by T. Ilyushchenya
t.a.ilyushhenya@utmn.ru
 Notes on the Course
Course of TG aims to provide students with a solid foundation
in the description and analysis of the grammatical system of
English, which constitutes one of the fundamental professional
language competences.

How to Do Your Best in the Course

 Attend the lectures 2 points per lecture
 Work in the seminars 5 points per seminar
 Make a presentation 10 points
 Succeed in the final test 30 points

Все материалы по курсу здесь

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1M3iz7Rmytwdi9PiLiV0WOnJNVGH9
sTIH?usp=sharing
 Course Structure
Part 1. Introduction
The object and basic notions of TG study

Part 2. Morphology
The grammar of the word
Notional parts of speech: the Noun
Notional parts of speech: the Verb (2 parts)
Notional parts of speech: the Adjective and the Adverb

Part 3. Syntax
Major notions of syntax. The word-group theory
Sentence: semantic, communicative and structural types
The utterance and its informative structure
 What Is Theoretical Grammar
About?
The Object and Basic Notions
of Theoretical Grammar Studies

Lecture 1
 Plan:
§1. Introductory Notes.
§2. The Language System in brief.
Lingual Units and their Hierarchy.
§3. Grammar as a Part of the Language
System.
§4. Grammatical Meaning, Form and
Category.
§5. Grammatical Structure of a Language.
 Introductory Notes (1)
 Homo sapiens – “man with wisdom”
 “Man the tool maker”
 Homo loquens – “man the speaking animal”
 Homo grammaticus

Grammar ← Greek ‘grammatike’ – “art of writing”

Greek ‘gramma’ – “a letter”

practical theoretical
describes grammar rules that explains these rules
are necessary to understand
and make sentences
 Introductory Notes (2)
Drawbacks of Practical Grammar for Users:
 The noun which denotes an object “already known” by
the listener should be used with the definite article.
“I've just read a book of yours about Spain and I wanted to ask you
about it.” – “It's not a very good book, I'm afraid” (S. Maugham).

 The continuous tense-forms cannot be used with link

verbs, verbs of the category of state.
1) My holiday at Crome isn't being a disappointment (A. Huxley).
2) For the first time, Bobby felt, he was really seeing the man (A.
Christie).
 The Language System in brief
 Language is a system of specific interconnected and
interdependent lingual signs united by their
common function of forming, storing and
exchanging ideas in the process of human
intercourse.
 A systemic approach

Ferdinand de Saussure: LANGUAGE

langue parole
(language proper) (speech proper)
a set of lingual units and the act of producing
the rules of their use utterances and its result
 Lingual Units and their Hierarchy (1)
Language is a structural system, represented by a number of
strata or levels.
Language structure exists as a hierarchy of parts constituting
the whole.
Levels: Basic (primary) and Non-basic (secondary)
has got a lingual unit doesn’t have a unit
of its own of its own (STYLISTICS)
The number of levels depends on how many language (or
speech) units there are in a language. They single out from 4
to 7 levels.
Merriam Webster’s Dictionary suggests 5 levels: morpheme,
word, phrase, clause, and sentence. The absence of phonemes
is remarkable here.
 Lingual Units and their Hierarchy (2)
The most wide-spread opinion on the basic levels and their
units:
 phonological / phonetic level: phoneme / (allo)phone
/l/ low, battle
 morphological level: morpheme / (allo)morph

–ed worked, phoned, wanted

 lexicological level: lexeme / (allo)lex

table writing table, dinner table

 syntax – minor: sentence / utterance

“writing a letter” John is writing a letter

A letter is being written by John
 syntax – major: text / discourse.
 Lingual Units and their Hierarchy (3)
General characteristics of all major linguistic units:
phoneme – the smallest meaningless distinctive unit;
morpheme – the smallest meaningful unit with structural
(morphological) function;
word – the smallest (basic) nominative unit;
phrase – a naming unit which nominates complex phenomena;
sentence – the smallest communicative unit which nominates
situations or events in their reference to reality (expresses
predication, i.e. has the predicative function);
super-sentential construction – a functional unit of speech
which follows regular lingual patterning; they are immediate
constituents of text and express a more or less isolated idea in it;
text (discourse) – the highest communicative unit; has semantic
(topical) unity and semantico-syntactic cohesion.
 Lingual Units and their Hierarchy (4)
Segmental units (all above) consist of phonemes and form
phonemic strings of various status (syllables, morphemes,
words, phrases, etc.).
Suprasegmental units are realized together with segmental
units and express different modificational meanings which
are reflected in the strings of segmental units.
Their function is often to mark the transition from the
sentence to the text – intonations, accents, pauses, patterns of
word-order.
 Lingual Units and their Hierarchy (5)
Syntagmatic relations are immediate linear relations
between units in an utterance.
E.g. A + PINT + OF + MILK – the word ‘pint’ has SR
with ‘a’, ‘of’, ‘milk’.
Paradigmatic relations cannot be directly observed
in utterances and are based on the principles of
similarity.
E.g. A PINT OF MILK
+ CUP
+ BOTTLE
+ CARTON – the word ‘pint’ has PR with
‘cup’, ‘bottle’, ‘carton’, etc.
 Lingual Units and their Hierarchy (6)
Language’s Basic Subsystems:
 Phonetical system includes the material units of
which language is made up – sounds, phonemes,
different intonation models, and accent models
(studied by phonology).
 Lexical system is the whole set of naming means
of language – words and stable word-
combinations (studied by lexicology).
 Grammatical system includes the rules and
regularities of using lingual units in the
construction of utterances in the process of human
communication (studied by grammar).
 Grammar as part of Language System (1)
Grammar is 1) more abstract and systematic and
due to that 2) the most stable.
TG is the branch of linguistics, which studies forms of
words and their relations in sentences in an abstract
way.

! To separate grammar from other language subsystems

is absolutely impossible, since grammatical forms and
regularities are meaningful, though their quality is different
from the quality of lexical meanings
the terminal part of the human arm
HANDS thingness (categorical meaning)
plurality (morphological meaning)
Grammar as part of Language System (2)
A grammatical structure of the language is the
whole complex of linguistic means used in grouping
words into utterances:
1) Grammatical word classes (notional & functional)
and their grammatical categories
Morphology is the field of linguistics that studies
the internal structure and grammatical forms of
words.
2) Sentence structure
Syntax (from Greek “together”, “arrangement”) is the study of the
principles and rules for constructing sentences in
natural languages.
Grammatical Meaning, Form & Category (1)
Word Meaning Lexical
Grammatical (the meaning of
the whole class or a subclass)
Table - a definite piece of furniture (lexical meaning)
- thingness (grammatical meaning of a whole class)
- countableness (grammatical meaning of a subclass)
Verbs – verbiality (the ability to denote actions or states);
Adjectives – qualitativeness (the ability to denote qualities);
Adverbs – adverbiality (“-”to denote quality of qualities).
Function words are devoid of any lexical meaning and
possess the grammatical meaning only – articles, particles,
prepositions, etc.
 Grammatical Meaning, Form & Category (2)
Grammatical meaning is the abstract meaning of a word
that depends on its role in a sentence; it varies with the
change of word-form. Unlike individual lexical meaning
grammatical meaning is the meaning of the whole class or
a subclass of words obligatory manifested in word-forms.
(1) Types of Grammatical Meaning
Referential Relational
(reflects objective properties (has nothing to do with
of real phenomena) the extra-linguistic reality)
quantity, time, etc. the meanings of number
and person with English
and Russian verbs
 Grammatical Meaning, Form & Category (3)
(2) Types of Grammatical Meaning
Explicit Implicit
(is always marked morphologically) (is not expressed
cat’s (possessiveness) formally)
is asked (passiveness) ‘table’ (inanimateness)
General Dependent
(the meaning of the whole (the meaning of a subclass
word-class, of a part of speech) within a part of speech)
Nouns – thingness Verbs: terminativeness/
non-terminativeness,
Nouns: contableness/
uncountableness
 Grammatical Meaning, Form & Category (4)
Grammatical form is a formal (material) means of
expressing grammatical meanings.
Types of grammatical forms present in a language usually
depend on the structure of the language.
Types of Grammatical forms
Synthetic Analytical
(are built up by a change (combinations of notional
in the body of a word) and auxiliary words)

Synthetic and analytical forms go hand in hand.

Grammatical Meaning, Form & Category (5)
Synthetic means:
Affixation – attaching grammatical morphemes to the root of
a word before, in the middle of or after it):
Grammatical prefixation – not present in Modern English.
Suffixation is the commonest: number in nouns, degrees of
comparison of adjectives, etc.
NB! English suffixes are rather few in number, a lot of zero
exponents in Modern English, many homonymous suffixes
(e.g. suffix -s).
Sound alteration is also non-productive in Modern English:
man – men, have – has. More extensively used in verbs: write –
wrote – written, sing – sang – sung, etc.
Grammatical Meaning, Form & Category (6)
Analytical means are characterized by:
 the unity in expressing meaning;

 absence of syntactic relations between the components;

 the unity of syntactic function.

have taken, will show, more comfortable

??? come in, go out, to bird-watch,
“all-for-the-better” attitude
Suppletion is a term used in Morphology to refer to cases
where it is not possible to show a relationship between
morphemes through a general rule, because the forms
involved have different roots: I – me, go – went, bad – worse.
Grammatical Meaning, Form & Category (7)
GMeaning + GForm = Grammatical categories

Types of categories:
 semantic (gender, quantity, modality);
 morphological (number and case of nouns;
degrees of comparison of adj-ves;
tense, voice, aspect, time correlation,
mood of verbs);
 syntactic(al) (of predicativity, of agent).

Grammatical category is a system of expressing a

generalized grammatical meaning by means of
paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms.
Grammatical Meaning, Form & Category (8)
(1) Types of Grammatical categories
(according to the relation to the objective reality)
Referential Relational
(immanent) (significational)
(have references (do not correspond
in the objective reality) with the objective relity)
Tense ↔Time Mood – expresses
Number ↔ Quantity the speaker’s attitude
towards the reality
 Grammatical Meaning, Form & Category (9)
(2) Types of Grammatical Categories
(according to the sphere of realization)
Morphological Syntactical
(are related to grammatical (are related to grammatical
properties of words) properties of sentences and
phrases)
e.g. predicativity, agent,
compoundness, etc.
lexico-grammatical word form-changing
(e.g. part-of-speech (e.g. number and case of Ns;
categories: noun, verb, degrees of comparison of As
transitivity, gender and Ds; tense, voice,
aspect, mood of Vs)
Grammatical Meaning, Form & Category (10)
Distinctive features of a grammatical category (by
A.Smirnitsky):
 Any grammatical category must be represented by, at least, two
grammatical forms. The category of case: in English – 2 forms (Common –
Possessive), in Russian – 6 forms.
 No grammatical category can be represented by all the word-forms of
the word. If so, we shall deal with a lexico-grammatical category. The
category of gender in English.
 One word-form can combine different grammatical categories. “Speaks"
expresses meanings of 5 categories: tense, person, number, mood, voice.
 No word-form can combine 2 categorial meanings.
 Every word-form must represent at least one categorial form or belong to
some grammatical category.
 Grammar studies categories of different types, most familiar are
morphological grammatical categories. The English verb is the most
developed system: 6-8 morphological categories.
 Grammatical Structure of a Language (1)
The grammatical structure of language is a system of means
used to turn linguistic units into communicative ones, in
other words – the units of language into the units of speech:
 word order – is the linear or time sequence in which words appear
in an utterance;
 inflections – are morphemic changes which adopt words to perform
certain grammatical function without changing their lexical
meanings;
 function words – are words largely devoid of lexical meaning
which are used to indicate various functional relationships among
the lexical words of an utterance;
 prosody – is the over-all musical pattern of stress, pitch, juncture in
which the words of an utterance are spoken;
 derivational contrast – is the contrast between words which have
the same base but differ in the number and nature of their
derivational affixes
Grammatical Structure of a Language (2)
1818 –August von Schlegel
Typological Classification of languages

SYNTHETIC
ANALYTICAL (ISOLATING)
(FLECTIONAL)

AGGLUTINATING FUSIONAL POLYSYNTHETIC

(АГГЛЮТИНАТИВНЫЕ) (ФУЗИОННЫЕ) (INCORPORATING)
Grammatical Structure of a Language (3)
Analytical (isolating) languages
 each word consists of a single morpheme
 no use of affixes to compose words
 semantic and grammatical concepts are expressed by the
use of separate words
 word order is used to show the functions of words
Mandarin:
[wᴐ mǝn tan tçin] – I plural play piano – We are playing the
piano
[wᴐ mǝn tan tçin lǝ] – I plural play piano past – We played the
piano
[ta da wᴐ mǝn] – S/he hit(s) I plural – S/he hits us.
Analytical languages are those of ”external grammar”
 Grammatical Structure of a Language (4)
Synthetic languages are those of ”internal grammar”
 most of grammatical meanings and grammatical relations
are expressed with the help of inflexions
 a word may be made up of several meaningful elements
Synthetic agglutinating languages
 is easy to determine the boundaries between morphemes
 each affix usually carries only one meaning
Swahili:
[ni-na-soma] – I-present-read – I am reading
[u-na-soma] – You-present-read – You are reading
[ni-li-soma] – I-past-read – I read
[u-li-soma] – You-past-read – You read
[ni-ta-soma] – I-future-read – I will read
[u-ta-soma] – You-future-read – You will read
Grammatical Structure of a Language (5)
Synthetic fusional languages
 hard to tell where one morpheme ends and the next
one begins
 one affix more frequently conveys several meanings
simultaneously
Spanish:
[ablo] – I am speaking
[abla] – She is speaking
[able] – I spoke
Russian:
Она читает
Он читал
 Grammatical Structure of a Language (6)
Polysynthetic (incorporating) languages
 complex words may be formed by combining several stems
and affixes
Sora (a language spoken in India):
[anin-ɲam-jo-te-n] – he catch fish non-past do – He is fish-
catching – He is catching fish
≈ English constructions baby-sit, trout-fish, etc.
[ɲɛn-ǝdʒ-dʒa-dar-si-ǝm] – I not receive cooked rice hand you –
I will not receive cooked rice from your hands.
English is a flexional-analytical language, which connects
words into sentences making wide use of the order of words
and functional words due to the limited number of
grammatical inflexions. The primary grammatical means is
the order of words.
 KEY TERMS
 Language vs. Speech
 Language structure (levels)
 Language unit / speech unit
 Segmental and suprasegmental units
 Paradigmatic & syntagmatic relations
 Grammar: morphology &syntax
 Grammatical meaning (explicit, implicit, general,
dependent)
 Grammatical form (synthetic, analytical, suppletive)
 Grammatical category (referential, significational,
morphological, syntactical)
 Grammatical structure of a language
 LITERATURE

Прибыток И.И. Лекции по теоретической грамматике

английского языка. Pp. 11-35.
Ривлина А.А. Теоретическая грамматика английского
языка. Unit 1 & Unit 3.
Левицкий Ю.А. Теоретическая грамматика
современного английского языка. С. 5-11.