THEME 5. Grammatical Means

Plan

I. A few remarks on terminology: ‘suffix’ and ‘inflexion’ (ending).

II. Types of word-form derivation:

1. synthetic types: a) inflexion;

b) sound alternation;

2. analytical types;

III. Suppletivism.

The preceding lectures made it clear how important is the form in grammar. Without some formal manifestation, no grammatical category can be established in the linguistic structure of a language.

Note: The most common grammatical form in Russian is the inflexion (ending) e.g. вода, воды, воде; бегаю, бегаешь, синий, синего и т.д.

The inflexion is a grammatical suffix. But as early as in the 1920s the academician L.V. Shcherba warned his contemporaries against restricting the form to affixes only.

Let us enumerate the most essential English grammatical means.

I. Inflexion (ending).

The principal endings of Modern English can be easily enumerated, since they are not very numerous:

1) –(e)s /s, z, iz/ of the plural of nouns (N(e)s): dogs, cats, dresses;

2) –’s /s, z, is/ of the possessive case (N’s): the girl’s hat, the aunt’s hat, the lass’s hat;

3) –er /ə/ of the comparative degree of adjectives (Adjer): greener;

4) – est /ist/ of the Superlative degree of adjectives (Adjest): greenest;

5) –(e)s /s, z, iz/ of the 3^d person sing. in the present indefinite form indicative mood (V(e)s): he runs;

6) –(e)d /t, d, id/ of the past tense (Ved): called, worked, wanted;

7) –ing /iŋ/ of participle I (Ving): calling;

8) –(e)d /t, d, id/ of participle II: called;

9) –(e)n /n/ of of participle (Ven): taken (nearly 100 verbs)

10)–ing /iŋ/ of the gerund: calling.

Besides these usual endings, one can single out rarer ones:

1) -(e)n of the plural of nouns in four words: oxen, children brethren, kine (the poetic form for cows);

2) various foreign plurals, borrowed together with the nouns from other languages:

a) – us / -i radius / radii, terminus / termini;

b) – a / -ae antenna / antennae, alga / algae;

c) – um / -a datum / data, memorandum / memoranda;

d) – on / -a criterion / criteria, phenomenon / phenomena;

e) –is / es analysis / analyses, oases / oases.

3) L. Bloomfield, E. Nida and other American linguists consider the final -m in the pronouns him, them, whom to be the ending of the objective case. This seems to be a very questionable ending, because the relation between the roots of the objective and native cases are different.

Obj.case: whom = who + m - Nom. Case who

them = the + m they

him = hi + m he

Russian grammarians (with the only exception of Prof. N. F. Irtenyeva) do not treat -m as an ending.

As seen from the list above, many English endings are homonymous, which fact impairs their efficiency in the text, since there are many homonyms belonging to different parts of speech. For instance, the telegram Ship sails tomorrow may be interpreted as a request to send sails to some place or a piece of information about the departure of a ship. In the first variant sails is a noun in the plural, in the second variant it is a verb in the present indefinite in the 3^d person singular.

Many modern grammarians favour the notion of the zero-inflexion (Ø). This means an absence of any ending which is pregnant with a grammatical meaning as a part of a system, as a member in an opposition.

E.g. рукá, руки, руке…

руки, рукØ, рукам….

The absence of an inflexion “рук” in this paradigm is a means of expressing the genitive case pl.

In English there are very many zero-forms, as the weak members of oppositions are usually unmarked. Thus in the plural form of the word books the lexical morpheme is book- and the grammatical one is -s. In the singular the lexical morpheme is the same, but the grammatical one is Ø.

Pl. book-s - Sg. book- Ø

Past work-ed - Present work- Ø

Variations of the same morpheme are called allomorphs.

Some allomorphs depend on the phonetic surrounding. Thus the plural allomorph(s) follows the voiceless consonant (books); /is/ - sibilants (masses); /z/ is used in all other 4 cases (bags, boys, girls). Other allomorphs have lexical distribution. i.e. they follow certain stems. For example, the Plural of ox is oxen, the plural of sheep is sheep. The Plural morpheme has several allomorphs: /s/, /z/, /iz/, /n/, etc.

Allomorphs are recognized by 2 features:

1) they have identical meanings;

2) they are in complementary distribution to each other, i.e. each stem is followed by only one of the allomorphs.

II. Sound alternation (interchange).

This grammatical form is to be found in the grammatical categories of the Plural of nouns (man – men), tense of verbs (come – came) and one or two examples of degrees of comparison (old – elder – eldest). Besides vowel-alternation (see the example above), there may be consonant-alternation (wife – wives, path /ө/ - paths /ðz/, house – houses /ziz/, build - built), or the combination of the two: seek – sought, leave – left). Sound alternation is neither productive nor widespread in the language, but it is employed in a few hundred most frequent words, which are met with on the oral or written text very often (about 15 percent in “Three Men in a Boat” by J.K. Jerome).

Sound alternation may be combined with endings: wife – wives, write – written, far – further.

Some scholars regard sound alternation as an affix which is not added before or after the stem (the way prefixes and suffixes are), but inserted inside the word. Then it is termed internal inflexion.

To divide the word-forms with sound alternation into lexical and grammatical morphemes, L. Bloomfield offered two methods of analysis:

a) goose – geese: the lexical morpheme is interrupted: / g-s /. The lexical morpheme is the same in the sing. and the pl. The grammatical morpheme of the sing. is /u:/, and of the pl. it is /i:/. This can be summed up in the following scheme:

goose ---- geese	word
/ g - s / / g - s /	lexical morpheme
/ u: / / i: /	grammatical morpheme

This analysis is simple enough. However, it is open to criticism, since the interrupted lexical morpheme / g - s / is supposed to denote “a long-necked web-footed bird”, but found in such a lexeme as “gas”.

b) goose – goose: the lexical morpheme both in the sing. and pl. is goose, the grammatical morphemes being Ø (zero) in the sing., and the change from /u:/ to /i:/ in the Pl.

goose ---- geese	word
goose ---- goose	lexical morpheme
Ø / u: i: /	grammatical morphemes

III. Suppletion (suppletivism)

This grammatical means is found in a few words, but they are very frequent and essential to the language. They are the verbs to be (am, is, was; be), to go (go, went); personal pronouns: I – me, we – us, she – her; adjectives: good – better, bad – worse.

Suppletion means using different roots as forms of the same word. In Indo-European languages (among them Russian, Latin, English, and German) suppletive forms come down from the depths of history, when there were no grammatical categories of tense, case or degrees of comparison. At that time, going at the moment of speech and before were regarded as different processes and denoted by different roots. Later on the abstract thinking of man developed the grammatical means which modified the same root. But the words enumerated above retained their suppletive forms because they were too frequently used to be easily replaced by analogy.

Suppletive forms carry the same grammatical meanings as other forms, e.g. inflexions. In the language system they are included into the ratio:

=

Once Prof. B.A. Ilyish suggested including among English suppletive forms such pairs as person – people, must – shall have(to), can – will be able (to). They have identical or similar meanings and different roots.

In his later works B.A. Ilyish didn’t insist upon this statement any longer, and he is justified in giving it up, because different forms of the same word must be in complementary distribution to each other, i.e. each of the forms must be the only one. If we take a word with suppletive forms as an example, go is used for the present and went for the past. We cannot use go for the past, too. If we take the example person – people, we shall see that for the singular only person is used, but for the plural, both people and persons. That means that people and person are not forms of the same word, but two different words: person - persons and people with no singular (in the meaning люди). The other two pairs mentioned by B.A. Ilyish are not forms of the same words, because in the present we can use both can, must and is able (to), has (to).

IV. Analytical means

All the three grammatical means enumerated above (inflexion, sound alternation, suppletion) are synthetical because both the lexical and grammatical meanings are united, or synthesized in one and the same word. They are opposed to the fourth group of grammatical means, which are named analytical because the lexical meaning in them is expressed in one word (in the nominal word) and the grammatical meaning is rendered by a combination of the notional word with a structural one. For instance, in the continuous aspect is reading the lexical meaning is expressed in reading, but the grammatical, aspect meaning is in the combination of is with reading.

Here is a list of English analytical forms:

1) passive (it) is written (be Ven);

2) continuous (he) is writing (be Ving);

3) perfect (he) has written (have Ven);

4) future (he) will write

(I) shall write (‘ll V);

5) negative form (he) does not write (do not V);

6) interrogative form does (he) write? (do not V);

7) emphatic form do write! (do V!);

8) the comparative degree more important (more Adj.);

9) the superlative degree the most important (most Adj.);

10) the suppositional mood (he) should write (should V);

11) the conditional mood (I) should write

(he) would write (’d V);

12) the imperative mood Let (us) come! (let N V).

(The last structure seems to be on the way of turning into an analytical form, see the lecture on moods).

In the analytical forms the structural adverbs more, most do not carry any lexical meaning of there own. They serve only to express some grammatical category together with a definite form (infinitive, participles I or II, etc.) of the notional word. Together they fuse into one word-form (словоформа – А.М. Смирницкий), opposed to usual forms of the same word: I write – I am writing – I have written – it is written – I shall write, etc.

The verb is a part of speech having the greatest number of analytical forms. The adjective and adverb also have some. But the noun in English has no analytical forms. Some scholars suppose articles and such prepositions as of, to, by, with to have lost their individual meaning and turned into structural words building the analytical forms of nouns: of a boy – the indefinite genitive case, of the boy – the definite genitive case, to a boy – the indefinite dative case, with the boy – the definite instrumental case, etc. In this country nobody seems to uphold such a viewpoint, because both articles and prepositions, though semi-structural parts of speech, still retain their own meanings and do not fuse together with the noun into one analytical word. (See the lecture on the Noun).

In a grammatical form consisting of three or four words, each grammatical category is expressed by only two neighbouring words, e.g.:

Future Continuous

(I) shall have been reading

Perfect

Continuous Passive

(it) is being written

The verbal grammatical categories are expressed in the analytical form in a strict order: Future – Perfect Continuous – Passive. If we change this order, we shall get a wrong form: I shall be having written, It will be had written.

Practically the length of an analytical form is restricted by four words. Longer, such as (it) will have been being read are so rare that most grammars do not mention them. Prof. I.B. Khlebnikova explains it by the limited volume of human memory.

The analytical forms of the verb are mostly the only forms to express their grammatical category. Only the suppositional mood has a very close synonym subjunctive I. The degrees of comparison can be expressed both synthetically and analytically (big – bigger – biggest, enormous – more enormous – most enormous).

Analytical means are very important in the English grammar. That and the great role of prepositions, articles conjunctions as well as that the word-order, account for the fact that Modern English is considered to be an analytical language. That characteristic is true in comparison with Old English, Latin or Modern German and Russian. But if we compare Modern English with more analytical languages, such as Chinese or Vietnamese, it should be regarded as a synthetical language.

References:

1. Бархударов, Л.С. Очерки по морфологии современного английского языка / Л.С. Бархударов. – М.: Высшая школа, 1975. – С. 27-41; 67-70.

2. Блох, М.Я. Теоретическая грамматика английского языка: учеб. / М.Я. Блох. – 4-е изд., испр. – М.: Высшая школа, 2003. – C. 36-49.

3. Блох, М.Я. Теоретические основы грамматики: учеб. / М.Я. Блох. – 3-е изд., испр. – М.: Высш. шк., 2002. – С. 85-91.

4. Иванова, И.П., Теоретическая грамматика современного английского языка: учеб. / И.П. Иванова, В.В. Бурлакова, Г.Г. Почепцов. – М.: Высшая школа, 1981. – С. 13-14.

5. Хаймович, Б.С. Теоретическая грамматика английского языка: учебное пособие / Б.С. Хаймович, Б.И. Роговская. – М.: Высшая школа, 1967. – С. 12-18, 24-25.