Chapter 2 - Grammatical category/meaning/form. Morphemic structure of the word
What does grammatical category mean?
1. a unite of grammar based on a morphological opposition of grammatical meanings presented in grammatical forms.
2. The general notion of grammar which determine the structure of language and find their expression in inflection (ფლექსია-სიტყვის ფორმის/დაბოლოების შეცვლა) and other devices.
How does the grammatical category is represented?
A grammatical category is generally represented by at least two grammatical forms, otherwise it cannot exist.
what grammatical form can be
Grammatical form can be morphemes, synthetic forms and grammatical word combinations, which are analytical form. Synthetic forms unite both lexical and grammatical meaning in one word. (for example, waiter and waitress. ) In analytical forms there are two or more words in which at least one element is auxiliary.
Give example of Grammatical category/meaning/form.
1. Grammatical category - What kind of word it is. For example, "walk"-verb
2. Grammarical meaning - What the word expresses. For example, walk - moves on foot
3. Grammatical form - How the word is shaped grammatically. For example, walks - Present simple, 3rd person singular
What does lexical and grammatical meanings mean?
1. Lexical meaning is the individual meaning of the word.
2. Grammatical meaning is the meaning of the whole class or subclass.
For example, the class of noun has the grammatical meaning of thingness. If we take a noun - table - we may say that it possess its individual lexical meaning (it corresponds to a definite piece of furniture) and the grammatical meaning of thingness (this is the meaning of the whole class). Besides this noun has grammatical meaning of subclass - countable and uncountable.
Note: there are some words that possess only grammatical meaning. These are: articles, particles, prepositions, conjunctions,etc.
What does verbiality, qualitative and adverbiality mean?
1. verbiality - the ability to denote actions or states
2. qualitative - the ability to denote qualities
3. adverbiality - the ability to denote quality of qualities
What types of grammatical meaning exist?
The grammatical meaning may be explicit and implicit.
The implicit grammatical meaning is not expressed formally (e.g. the word "table" doesn't contain any hints in its form as to it being inanimate)
The explicit grammatical meaning is always marked morphologically, it has its marker. For example, in the word "cats" the grammatical meaning of plurality is shown in the form of noun.
What types of implicit grammatical meaning exist?
There are two types of implicit grammatical meaning: General adn Dependent.
The general grammatical meaning is the meaning of the whole word-class, of a part of speech. E.g. nouns - general grammatical meaning of thingness
The dependent grammatical meaning is the meaning of a subclass within the same part of speech. E.g, noun has dependent grammatical meaning of countable, uncountable, annimate, innanimate.
speak about types of grammatical category.
There are two types of grammatical category: referential grammatical categories and siginificative categories.
Referential grammatical categories have refereneces in the objective reality. Significative categories don't correspond to anything in the objective reality. They correlate only iwth conceptual matters. To this type belong the category of mood and degree.
what does opposition and binary privative opposition mean?
The relation between two grammatical forms differing in meaning and external signs is called opposition - book:books (unmarked member/ marked member) e.g. the grammatical category of number is realized through the opposition singular:plural.
the binary privative opposition is formed by a contrastive pair of members in which one member is characterised by the presence of a certain differential feature (mark), while the other is characterised by the absence of this feature.
the member in which the feature is present is called the marked or storn or positive and is commonly designated by the symbol +
The member in which feature is absent is called unmarked, weak, or negative and is designated by - (minus)
work:worked
What does transposition and neutralization mean?
Transposition is the use of a linguistic unit in an unusual environment or in the function that isn't characteristic of it - He is a lion
neutralization is the reduction of the opposition to one of its members:
custom::customes-x :: customes; x:: spectacles
What methods of grammatical analysis does exist ?
1. the method of immediate constituents (IC method)
2. The oppositional
3. transformational
4. componential
Speak about the method of IC. Make the tree diagram (derivation tree) of the sentence - Poor John ran away.
the aim of IC analysis is to discover and demonstrate the interrealtionships of the words in a linguistic structure - the sentence or the word-combination.
Poor, John, ran, away - are ultimate constituents - (smallest units-words)
poor John / ran away -IC
What does the morphology and morpheme mean? Which main types of morphemes do you know?
Morphology is the section of grammar that studies the word form.
Morpheme is the smallest unite of language that has meaning, but one of the most widely used definitions of the morpheme is: The morphem is the smallest linear meaningful unite having a sound expression.
Morphems may include roots and affixes. The main types of morphemes are the root morphem and affix morpheme.
What are root morphem, affix morpheme, zero morpheme and allomorph
root morpheme is the root of the word itself. E.g Books - here root morpheme is book
Affix morpheme include either a prefix or suffix, or both.
zero morpheme is the morpheme that have no ending but are capable of taking one in the other forms of the same category, which isn't quite true for English. (It isn'r appeared in the sentence. It has no phonetic form or sound)
Allomorph is a variant of a morpheme which occurs in certain environments.
How the grammatical meaning is conveyed in morphology?
grammatical meaning in morphology is conveyed by means of:
1. Flexion - a word-changing formant which may be outer (approached, streets) or inner (foot-feet, find - found)
2. Superlative word forms - to be - am - was / good-better-best
3. Analytical form - is coming, has asked
Speak about polysemy, synonymy and homonymy in morphology
Morphological polysemy implies the representaion of a word as different parts of speech, e.g. the word 'but' may function as a conjunction (last, but not least), a preposition (there was nothing but firelight), noun in the singular and plural (there was a large but), etc.
Morphologycal synonymy reflects a variety of representations by different parts of speech for the same meaning. E.g. due to (adjective), thanks to (noun), because of (prepositions), etc.
Morphological homonymy my be described as phonetic equivalents with different grammatical functions, e.g. he looks - her looks. they wanted - the job wanted.