MONDAY Theory of language (the first lecture) (Галеева Марина Вячеславовна)

Theoretical grammar

The following course of theoretical grammar serves to describe the grammatical structure of the English language, where all parts are interconnected. The difference between theoretical and practical grammar is that practical grammar prescribes certain rules. Theoretical grammar presents facts

Linguistics is not comparative philology, it is not the learning of many languages, it is not literary Criticism and it is not Traditional Study of Grammar

Linguistics is the study of languages, the nature of language. We need linguistics to know the nature of language. Linguistics are about:

1) phonetics

2) phonology

3) morphology

4) syntax

5) semantics

6) pragmatics

We will mostly concentrate on morphology and syntax.

Language is a means of forming and storing ideas as reflections of reality and exchanging them in the process of human intercourse.

Language incorporates the three constituent parts (“sides”)

Any linguistic description may have a practical or theoretical purpose.

The levels the language consists of:

1) phonological level

2) morpheme

3) lexeme

4) phraseme

5) sentence

6) text

Morpheme is the smallest part of the word with meaning.

Lexeme is a word of a language.

Phraseme is a connection of words.

Word is building-block with a meaning. Lexemes can have different word forms. As for morphemes.

MORPHEMES

e.g. un/for/get/able

un – prefix

for – prefix

get – root

able – suffix

Morpheme is the second main unit of the language structure. It is the shortest part, which carries a definite grammatical meaning. Two very important things about morphemes:

1) Morphemes should be identifiable from one word to another

2) Each should contribute in some way to the meaning of the word, but it can’t be just a repeating part of a word

e.g. attack

stack

tackle

taxi // all these words don’t have the same root

Kinds of morphemes: bound versus free

If we look at the word helpfulness, we understand that not all of the parts have the same status. Help is the core. It supplies the most precise and concrete element in its meaning, shared by a family of related words like helper, helpless, helplessness and unhelpful. “help” is a free morpheme, while “ful” and “-ness” are bound morphemes. Free morphemes can stand on their own. Morphemes that cannot stand on their own are called bound.

Words can both contain bound morphemes with free ones and only bound morphemes

“free + bound and bound+bound”

//English is a crazy language – the name of a book to read //

Some bound morphemes are met only in one complex word. E.g., morphemes cran-, huckle- and form- in cranberry, huckleberry and gormless. “gormless – бестолковый” Cranberry and huckleberry are compounds whose second element is clearly the free morpheme berry, occurring in several other compounds such as strawberry, blackberry and blueberry; A name commonly given to such bound morphemes is cranberry morpheme.

2. Kinds of morphemes in accordance with their function

root – the only free, or bound

prefix – bound

suffix – bound

affix – bound

Many roots = compound. E.g. bookcase, motorbike, penknife, truck-driver words with two bound roots are electrolysis, electroscopy, microscopy, microcosm, pachyderm, etc.

3. Identifying morphemes independently of meaning

In general, prefix “-re” has the meaning of redoing something or repeating something, but a lot of words can be considered as monomorphemic. e.g. refer-prefer-confer-defer-transfer=infer as far as a combination of letters cannot be considered a morpheme without having some meaning

Ways of forming words

It is possible distinguish two kinds of morphological rules:

1) inflectional rules (dog-dogs)

2) word formation rules (dog catcher)

The English plural (dog-dogs) is a inflectional rule (inflection = okon4anie)

Word formation:

1) derivation (involves affixing bound (non-independent) forms to existing lexemes, whereby the addition of the affix derives a new lexeme (independent)

2) compounding – combining complete word forms into a single compound form (dog catcher)

Morphology and syntax

My dog just snerdled under the fence. // translate this sentence at home

Translation: «Моя собака прорыла носом путь наружу под забором.»

snerdle = to dig one’s way out from under a fence by moving one’s nose back and forth repeatedly (definition can’t be found in a dictionary, it is purely based on the language analysis)

Morphology is the study of shapes. Syntax, on the other hand, is how words combine to form sentences.

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