V. Analytical means of expression of grammar meaning and their role in the modern English

Analytical grammatical forms are built up by combination of at least two words, one of which is a grammatical auxiliary (word-morpheme, free morpheme), and the other, a word of substantial meaning.

Among the free morphemes there are auxiliary elements of analytical forms: verbal elements “do, be, have, will, shall, would, should, may, might” adverbial elements more, most, infinitive particle “to”, articles.

However, there is a tendency with some linguists to recognize as analytical not all such grammatically significant combinations, but only those that are grammatically idiomatic, i.e. whose relevant grammatical meaning is not immediately dependent on the meanings of their component elements taken apart. For example, the form of the verbal perfect where the auxiliary ‘have’ has completely lost its original meaning of possession, is the most standard analytical form in English morphology. But analytical degrees of comparison come very near to free combinations of words by their lack of idiomatism. But ‘beautiful-more beautiful-the most beautiful’ represent the same coordination of grammar meaning within the category as big-bigger-the biggest, so we have to use the approach of gradation of idiomatism here, because the demand of absolute idiomatism here is to strong and contradicts with logical structure.

To tell analytical forms from the phrases several criteria can be used:

- common grammatical meaning is a combination of all the components of the grammar form (auxiliary verb conveys paradigmatic meanings of, for example, number and person, but the general tense, voice and modal meaning is composed only of all the components put together. Each of the components doesn’t have information about the general meaning of the form (must have been sent);

- historically analytical forms originated from syntactic phrases, mainly from certain types of compound predicates. They became analytical forms only when their syntactic relations disappeared.

Syntactic relations with other words in the text are established only by the whole form, parts of it can’t have relations with other words: ‘was driving the car’, the car is an object to the whole of the verb form,’ had often remembered’.

What proves that English is an analytical language? If we compare the number of word-changing affixes with other, analytical means of word-changing in English, we will see, that the biggest part of the grammar forms are made with the help of auxiliary words (auxiliary and modal verbs, prepositions, particles, articles). In a syntactical language, like Russian, the number of auxiliary words is very small (будет, может, должен, более), as compared to a great number of inflections for declension, conjugation etc.

Glossary of Linguistic Terms

1. analytical form – аналитическая форма, составная форма, образованная сочетанием служебного и знаменательного слов

2. free morphemes – свободные морфемы, образующие аналитические формы в качестве служебных слов

3. auxiliary – вспомогательное, служебное слово

4. substantial meaning – основательное значение, самостоятельное лексическое значение

5. idiomatism – семантическая спаянность частей словосочетания, значение которого не выводится из значений отдельных частей

6. compound predicate – сложное сказуемое

7. syntactic relations – синтаксические отношения, между компонетами словосочетания или членами предложения (атрибутивные, объектные и др.)

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