Теоретическая грамматика английского языка

8. How are units of language divided? 9. WMch form a hierarchy of levels? 10. What means of expressing grammatical meaning do you know? 11. Give definitions to such notions as; Morph, тофЬете, all0m0фhs, word, grammatical category, grammatical meaning. Parts of speech. The main criteria of parts of speech classification (semantic, formal, functional). Features of the notional and functional parts of speech. The words of language depending on various formal and semantic features are divided into grammatical classes of words. The traditional grammatical classes of words are called parts of speech. The term part of speech was introduced in the grammatical teaching of the Ancient Greece, where there was no strict difference between the word as a vocabulary unit and the word as a functional element of the sentence. Many scholars made attempts to work out the principles of syntactic classification of English words. ТЪе three criteria of characterization of parts of speech have been developed by the outstanding home linguists Smimitsky A.I. and Ilyish B.A. In connection with their study of the English Grammar parts of speech are discriminated on the basis of the three criteria: semantic, formal, functional. 1. The semantic criterion presupposes the generalized meaning characteristic of all words of a given class. This meaning is understood as the categorical meaning of the part of speech. 2. The formal criterion reveals the morphological characteristics of words of a given part of speech. 3. The fimctional criterion concems tlie syntactic role of words m the sentence typical of a given part of speech. e.g. verbs have the function of predicate, nouns have the fimction of subject, object, adjectives serve as attributes or predicatives and adverbs are usually adverbial modifiers. These three criteria are referred to as meaning, form and function. In accord with the described criteria words are divided into notional and fimctional. To the notional parts of speech belong the noun, the verb, the adjective, the adverb, the numeral and the pronoun. The features of the noun can be described in the following way: 1) the categorial meaning of substance ("thing ness") 2) the changeable forms of number and case; the specific suffixal forms of derivation 3) the substantive fimctions in the sentence (subject, object, substantival predicative) The features of the Adjective: 1) the categorial meaning of property 2) the forms of the degrees of comparison, the specific suffixal forms of derivation 9