Revision Tasks

Account for the ambiguity of some of these sentences:

1. Sergent: “Who likes moving pictures?”

(Most of the men eagerly step forward.)

“All right, you fellows carry the pictures from the basement to the attic.”

2. - What has four legs and flies?

- I don’t know.

- A dinner table.

3. A lady had just bought a postage stamp.

“Must I stick it on myself?”

“Positively not, Madame. It will accomplish more if you stick it on the envelope.”

4. – Is the chicken big enough to eat when it’s 2 days old?

- Of course, not!

- Then how does it manage to live?

Contents:

page

1. Grammar as a linguistic science.

Morphology. 1

2. Grammatical form, meaning and category. 4

3. Wordbuilding and wordchanging. 9

4. Synthetic means of expressing grammatical meaning.

Their role in the Modern English. 11

5. Analytical means of expressing grammatical meaning.

Their role in the Modern English. 13

6. Parts of speech and the principles of their classification. 15

7. Noun. The general description. 19

8. Noun. The category of number. 20

9. Noun. The category of case. 22

10. Noun. The category of gender. 24

11. Article, its role and function. The number of articles in English. 25

12. Adjectives. Their grammatical categories. 27

13. Adverbs. Classification of adverbs. 30

14. Verb. The general characteristics. 32

15. Verb. The category of voice. 34

16. Verb. The category of mood. 36

17. Verb. The categories of tense, aspect and time correlation. 38

18. Verb. The categories of person and number. 40

19. Non-finite verbs (Verbids). Infinitive and gerund. 41

20. Non-finite verbs. Participles. 44

21. Pronouns. 46

22. Numeral. 48

23. Words of the category of state, statives. 49

24. Functional parts of speech. 50

25. Modal words. 53

Syntax

26. Sentence and phrase as the main objects of syntax. 54

27. Classification of phrases. 56

28. The notion of syntactic relations, their main types. 57

29. The sentence and its aspects. 59

30. The semantic and pragmatic aspects of the sentence. 60

31. The structural aspect of the sentence. 63

32. The actual aspect of the sentence. 65

33. Predication and modality. 66

34. Elliptical sentences. 68

35. Models of syntactic analysis. Parts of sentence. 70

36. The model of immediate constituents. 71

37. The distributional model. 73

38. The transformational model. 74

39. Principal parts of sentence. Subject. 76

40. Predicate. 78

41. The secondary parts of the sentence. 82

42. The apposition, direct address, parentheses and insertions. 90

43. Loose parts of sentence. 93

44. Complex, compound and intermediary types of sentences. 95

45. The composite sentence. Compound sentences. 100

46. Types of subordinate clauses. 104

- Subject clauses 105

- Predicative clauses 106

- Object clauses 106

- Attributive clauses 108

- Adverbial clauses 109

- Clauses of place 109

- Clauses of time 110

- Causal clauses 111

- Conditional clauses 112

- Clauses of result 112

- Clauses of purpose 113

- Clauses of concession 114

- Clauses of manner and comparison 115

- Other types of subordinate clauses 117

- Appositional clauses 117

- Parenthetical clauses 118

47. The problem of higher syntactical units. 120

48. Revision tasks 130