Grammatical Categories and Markers. Lecture 2

Transcription

1 Grammatical Categories and Markers Lecture 2

2 Units of grammar The smallest unit of meaning is the morpheme. morpheme word phrase sentence the smallest the largest grammatical unit grammatical unit Figure 1: Grammatical units

3 Morphology is the study of word structure. flower, enjoyment, boys, кон, коне Free morphemes Bound morphemes Roots Affixes (derivational, inflectional)

4 Suffixes are affixes which attach to the end of words. enjoyment vocational gramm-atic-al-iz-ation Suffixes may be derivational (i.e. the examples above) or inflectional. Prefixes which stand in front of the root morpheme. They do not make the word change its class, but change its meaning. dis-mount, un-lock They belong to the category of derivational affixes.

5 Grammatical markers All the grammatical forms of the word build up its grammatical paradigm. Grammatical paradigms express categorial meaning through their functional oppositions (Blokh 1983). There are binary and ternary oppositions. 3 rd p. sg. non-3 rd p. sg.

6 Grammatical forms can be synthetical and analytical. Synthetical forms, e.g. big bigger biggest or change of the root morpheme (suppletivity), e.g. swim swam swum. Analytical forms (+an auxiliary word), e.g. difficult more difficult most difficult.

7 The word has to be grammatically shaped in order to function in the language. Which are the grammatical categories of the noun in English and Bulgarian? Which are the grammatical categories of the verb in English and Bulgarian? In English grammatical markers are considerably less than in Bulgarian.

8 J.Molhova: a grammatical morpheme has several grammatical meanings The adjectival suffix -er has the following two meanings: 1. adjective; 2. comparative degree.

9 Types of distribution The distribution of a lingual unit depends on the different environments of that unit. phonemic distribution of morphemes, e.g. fans, faxes morphemic distribution of morphemes, e.g. boxes, oxen

10 3 types of distribution (Blokh 2000) contrastive (e.g. plays played) non-contrastive (e.g. burned = burnt Past tense) complementary (e.g. books, boxes, oxen, etc. - allomorphs)

11 Can you find some examples of homonymy with the grammatical suffixes? the substantival suffix -s marking the plural of some noun is homonymous with game-games the verbal suffix -s, marking the 3rd p. sg. of the Present Simple Tense of the verb work-works

12 Some other examples of homonymy with the grammatical suffixes? the verbal suffix -ed marking the past participle of the verb work-worked is an homonym with the verbal suffix -ed marking the Past Simple Tense work-worked

13 Some more examples of homonymy with the grammatical suffixes? the substantival suffix -en marking the plural form of some nouns child-children is an homonym with the verbal suffix -en marking the past participle of some verbs write-written

14 And more examples of homonymy with the grammatical suffixes? the gerundial suffix -ing reading is an homonym with the suffix -ing marking the present participle reading

15 Can you find some antonyms among the grammatical markers? the presence of the -s morpheme marking the plural form of the noun could be considered to be an antonym to the zero morpheme pointing to the form of the singular table0º-tables

16 In traditional grammar three criteria are used to divide the words into grammatical classes: semantic (the general meaning of all the words in a class) formal (the grammatical forms of the words ) functional (the syntactic positions of words )

17 On the basis of these criteria, words are divided into notional grammatical classes = an open-class subsystem (Internet, , website, reboot, download) functional series of words = a closedclass (grammatical) subsystem

18 She sings. those cats Deictic categories: here there Agreement (concord) this that / these those now then Levinson (1983) : Meet me here a week from now with a stick about this big.