For those interested in a little info about this site: it’s a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for — just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn’t be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary — which is now in the public domain. However, after a day’s work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary — which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it’s not properly structured for parsing. That’s when I stumbled across the UBY project — an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I’m happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
We intuitively know what a WORD is. In written language words are separated by spaces. In spoken language you can sometimes hear a pause between them, although in most cases there’s nothing noticeable that separates words in spoken language.
We can distinguish the orthographic word, the grammatical word and the lexeme.
An ORTHOGRAPHIC WORD is a word form separated by spaces from other orthographic words in written texts and the corresponding form in spoken language.
In the example:
She wanted to win the game.
there are six orthographic words: she, wanted, to, win, the and game.
A GRAMMATICAL WORD is a word form used for a specific grammatical purpose.
For example in the sentence:
That man over there said that he would like to talk to you.
we have the word THAT used twice. This is one orthographic word, but we’re dealing with two grammatical words here: the first THAT is a demonstrative adjective and the other THAT is a conjunction.
A LEXEME is a group of word forms with the same basic meaning that belong to the same word class.
For example the words AM, WAS, IS belong to one lexeme, as they have the same basic meaning and are all verbs. Also the words COME and CAME belong to the same lexeme.
How do they relate to one another?
In many cases orthographic and grammatical words overlap. For example in the sentence:
They bought the house.
there are four orthographic words and four grammatical words, so there is one-to-one correspondence in this case.
But if we slightly modify the sentence like so:
They didn’t buy the house.
there are now five orthographic words and six grammatical words. This is because the orthographic word DIDN’T represents a sequence of two grammatical words: DID + NOT.
It may also be the other way around. In the sentence:
I kind of like it.
there are five orthographic words, but only four grammatical words, because the two orthographic words KIND OF actually represent a single grammatical word.
You can also watch the video version here:
-
Types
of grammatical description of the English language (= varieties of
Grammar).
-
The
notion of grammar. Descriptive vs prescriptive grammar.
TRADITIONALLY
in linguistics, grammar
is the set of structural rules that governs the composition of
clauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language.
-
abstract
character:
it abstracts itself from particular & concrete and builds its
rules & laws, taking into consideration only common features of
groups and words. -
stability
(laws & categories of Grammar exist through ages without
considerable changes).
Descriptive
is an approach that describes the grammatical constructions
that are used in a language, without making any evaluative judgments
about their standing in society.
These
grammars are commonplace in linguistics, where it is standard
practice to investigate a ‘corpus’ of spoken or written material, and
to describe in detail the patterns it contains.
-
Cognitive
-
Comparative
-
Generative
-
Mental
-
Performance
-
Reference
-
Theoretical
-
Transformational
-
Universal
Prescriptive
try
to enforce rules about what they believe to be the correct uses of
language.
is
a manual that focuses on constructions where usage is divided, and
lays down rules governing the socially correct use of language.
-
Pedagogical
(traditional), -
Practical
-
Grammatical
analysis and instruction designed for second-language students. -
Pedagogical
grammar
is
commonly used to denote.
(1)
pedagogical
process—
the explicit treatment of elements of the target language systems as
(part of) language teaching methodology;
(2)
pedagogical
content-reference
sources of one kind or another that present information about the
target language system
1)Comparative
grammar
was
important in Europe (19th c.). Also called comparative philology, was
originally stimulated by the discovery by Sir William Jones (1786)
that Sanskrit was related to Latin, Greek, and German. Is the study
of the relationships or correspondences between two or more languages
and the techniques used to discover whether the languages have a
common ancestor. provides an explanatory basis for how a human being
can acquire a first language.
The
theory of grammar is a theory of human language and hence establishes
the relationship among all languages.
-
It
assumed a view of linguistic change as large, systematic and lawful
and on the basis of this assumption attempted to explain the
relationship between languages in terms of a common ancestor often a
historical one for which there was no actual evidence in the
historical record.
2)Generative
grammar
arguably
originates in the work of Noam Chomsky, beginning in the late 1950s.
refers
to a particular approach to the study of syntax. attempts to give a
set of rules that will correctly predict which combinations of words
will form grammatical sentences. GG rules function as an algorithm to
predict grammaticality as a discrete (yes-or-no) result.
3)Mental
grammar
The
generative grammar stored in the brain that allows a speaker to
produce language that other speakers can understand, the innate basis
for learning, speaking and understanding any (verbal) language.»All
humans are born with the capacity for constructing a Mental Grammar,
given linguistic experience; this capacity for language is called
the Language Faculty (Chomsky)
4)Pedagogical (traditional) grammar
5)Performance
grammar
aims
not only at describing and explaining intuitive judgments and other
data concerning the well-formedness of sentences of a language as
they are actually used by speakers in dialogues.
PG
centers attention on language production; the problem of production
is dealt with before problems of reception and comprehension
6)Reference grammar
7)Theoretical
grammar
An
approach that goes beyond the study of individual languages, to
determine what constructs are needed in order to do any kind of
grammatical analysis, and how these can be applied consistently in
the investigation of linguistic universals Unlike school grammar,
theoretical grammar does not always produce a ready-made decision. In
language there are a number of phenomena interpreted differently by
different linguists
Transformational
grammar
Models
of Tras. G
Standard
Theory (1957–1965)
Extended
Standard Theory (1965–1973)
Revised
Extended Standard Theory (1973–1976)
Relational
grammar (ca. 1975–1990)
Government
and binding/Principles and parameters theory (1981–1990)
Minimalist
Program (1990–present)
9)Universal
grammar
(Noam
Chomsky): ability
to learn grammar is hard-wired
into
the brain.
linguistic ability manifests itself without being taught, and that
there are properties that all natural human languages share. It is a
matter of observation and experimentation to determine precisely what
abilities are innate and what properties are shared by all languages.
-
Morphology
and syntax as parts of grammar.
The
grammatical structure of language comprises two major parts –
morphology and syntax. The two areas are obviously interdependent and
together they constitute the study of grammar.
Morphologydeals
with paradigmatic and syntagmatic properties of morphological units –
morphemes and words. It is concerned with the internal structure of
words and their relationship to other words and word forms within the
paradigm. It studies morphological categories and their realization.
Syntax,
on the other hand, deals with the way words are combined. It is
concerned with the external functions of words and their relationship
to other words within the linearly ordered units – word-groups,
sentences and texts. Syntax studies the way in which the units and
their meanings are combined. It also deals with peculiarities of
syntactic units, their behavior in different contexts.
Syntacticunits
may be analyzed from different points of view, and accordingly,
different syntactic theories exist.
-
Theoretical
grammar of English as a branch linguistics
An
approach that goes beyond the study of individual languages, to
determine what constructs are needed in order to do any kind of
grammatical analysis, and how these can be applied consistently in
the investigation of linguistic universals.
Unlike
school grammar, theoretical grammar does not always produce a
ready-made decision. In language there are a number of phenomena
interpreted differently by different linguists.
TG
studies the forms of the words & their relations in sentences in
more abstract way, giving the profound description of existing
grammatical laws & tendencies; looks inside into the structure of
parts of language & expose the mechanisms of their
functioning.
The
aim of TG is to present a scientific description of a certain
language in terms of its grammatical system.
-
Typological
classification of languages. Synthetic and analytic grammatical
means.
Attempts
to classify languages by their types rather than by their
relationships were made from the beginning of historical linguistics.
In 1818 August Von Schlegel proposed a typological classification
which was widely followed and elaborated through the 19th century and
still has a great popularity. Schlegel’s system was based on the
number of meaningful elements (morphemes) which could be present in a
word and the modification these might undergo. According to this
classification, languages can be divided into three types- isolating
or analytic, inflectional or synthetic, and agglutinative
1.ISOLATING
(analysis): Isolating languages exhibit no formal paradigms. It has
only one element of basic meaning per word and in such cases they are
monomorphemic. For example, when, as, since, from, etc. and their
grammatical status and class-membership is determined by their
syntactic relations with the rest of the sentence in which they
occur. In English invariable words such as prepositions, conjunctions
and many adverbs are isolating in types. Chinese, several other
Southeast Asian languages-Vietnamese are examples of such types.Words
in such languages are assigned to word-classes on the basis of
different syntactic functions.
2.
INFLECTIONAL: If there are several meaningful elements, but are in
some way fused together or are modified in different contexts, the
language will be inflectional. In it words having several grammatical
forms in which it is difficult to assign each category to a specific
and serially identifiable morphemic section. Classical languages such
as Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit are the most obvious examples of
such type.
English
nouns such as men, geese, mice, women are inflectional. Inflectional
languages were held to represent the highest stage of evolution and
the most perfect form of human communication.
3.
AGGLUTINATIVE: If there is more than one element of basic meaning,
but these were kept apart from one another and undergo no
modification, the language is agglutinative. Morphologically complex
words in which individual grammatical categories may be easily
assigned to morphemes stung together serially in the structure of the
word-form exemplify the process of agglutination. Turkish, Sudanese
and Japanese are examples of such type with the Turkish as the
perfect one. Languages of these types are alike of necessity in
respect of word structure. Grammars of these languages are very
different in other respects.
-
Analytic
languages.
analytic
/ isolating / root languages (English, Chinese, Vietnamese) — all
words are invariable
—
syntactic relationships are shown by word order
—
in order to express person, case, and other categories, the language
needs single words
—
prepositional phrases and modal verbs are used → to
the boy, did he arrive?
-
are
defined as being of ‘external’
grammar
of the word. -
Analytic
features are traced in morphological lack of changeability of the
word and existence of periphrastic constructions. The words
remaining morphologically unchanged convey the grammatical meaning
by combining with auxiliary or notional words, word order is strict. -
Many
words – analytic
-
Synthetical
languages.
—
synthetic
/ inflectional / inflecting languages (Czech, Finnish, Latin, Arabic)
—
the words typically contain more than one morpheme
—
there is no one-to-one correspondence between the morphemes and the
linear structure of the word
—
words are formed by suffixes, declination, conjugation etc.
—
forms of person, case, and other categories are compounded in one
word
—
are defined as the languages of the ‘internal’
grammar
of the word.
—
are inflectional: most grammatical meanings and most grammatical
relations of the words are primarily expressed by inflectional
devices.
-
Morphological
forms can be regarded as synthetic where the base of the word is
inseparably connected with its formants, presenting a grammatical
category. -
More
than one morpheme in a word — synthetic
-
Language
system and language structure.
Language
is regarded as a system of elements (or: signs, units) such as
sounds, words, etc. These elements have no value without each other,
they depend on each other, they exist only in a system, and they are
nothing without a system. System implies
the characterization of a complex object as made up of separate parts
(e.g. the system of sounds). Language is a structural
system. Structuremeans
hierarchical layering of parts in `constituting the whole. In the
structure of language there are four main structural levels:
phonological, morphological, syntactical and supersyntatical. The
levels are represented by the corresponding level units:
The phonological level
is the lowest level. The phonological level unit is the`phoneme.
It is a distinctive unit (bag
– back).
The morphological level
has two level units:
-
the `morpheme –
the lowest meaningful unit (teach
– teacher); -
the word
— the
main naming (`nominative) unit of language.
The syntactical level
has two level units as well:
-
the word-group –
the dependent syntactic unit; -
the sentence –
the main communicative unit.
The supersyntactical level
has the text as
its level unit.
To
sum it up, each level has its own system. Therefore, language is
regarded as a system of systems. The level units are built up in the
same way and that is why the units of a lower level serve the
building material for the units of a higher level. This similarity
and likeness of organization of linguistic units is
called isomorphism.
This is how language works – a small number of elements at one
level can enter into thousands of different combinations to form
units at the other level.
-
Parts
of speech in English: criteria.
The
parts of speech are classes of words, all the members of these
classes having certain characteristics in common which distinguish
them fr om the members of other classes. The problem of word
classification into parts of speech still remains one of the most
controversial problems in modern linguistics. There are four
approaches to the problem:
-
Classical
(logical-inflectional) -
Functional
-
Distributional
-
Complex
-
Classical
approach
-
Functional
approach
-
Distributional
approach
-
Complex
approach
-
The
field nature of parts of speech
-
The
notional :: functional parts of speech
Notional
parts of speech perform certain functions in the sentence whereas
functional express relations between the words. Functional parts of
speech never change their form.
-
Limitations
to the traditional classification of the parts of speech in English
Traditionally,
all parts of speech are subdivided on the upper level of
classification into notional
words andfunctional
words.
Notional words, which traditionally include nouns, verbs, adjectives,
adverbs, pronouns and numerals, have complete nominative meanings,
are in most cases changeable and fulfill self-dependent syntactic
functions in the sentence. Functional words, which include
conjunctions, prepositions, articles, interjections, particles, and
modal words, have incomplete nominative value, are unchangeable and
fulfill mediatory, constructional syntactic functions.
There
are certain limitations and controversial points in the traditional
classification of parts of speech, which make some linguists doubt
its scientific credibility. First of all, the three
criteria(semantic,formal,functional)
turn out to be relevant only for the subdivision of notional words.
As
for functional words, they are rather characterized by the absence of
all three criteria in any generalized form.
Second,
the status of pronouns and the numerals, which in the traditional
classification are listed as notional, is also questionable, since
they do not have any syntactic functions of their own, but rather
different groups inside these two classes resemble in their formal
and functional properties different notional parts of speech: e.g.,
cardinal numerals function as substantives, while ordinal numerals
function as adjectives; the same can be said about personal pronouns
and possessive pronouns.
Third,
it is very difficult to draw rigorous borderlines between different
classes of words, because there are always phenomena that are
indistinguishable in their status. E.g., non-finite forms of verbs,
such as the infinitive, the gerund, participles I and II are actually
verbal forms, but lack some of the characteristics of the verb: they
have no person or number forms, no tense or mood forms, and what is
even more important, they never perform the characteristic verbal
function, that of a predicate. There are even words that defy any
classification at all; for example, many linguists doubt whether the
words of agreement and disagreement, yes and no, can
occupy any position in the classification of parts of speech.
These,
and a number of other problems, made linguists search for alternative
ways to classify lexical units. Some of them suggested that the
contradictions should be settled if parts of speech were classified a
unified basis of subdivision; in other words, if a homogeneous, or
monodifferential classification of parts of speech were undertaken.
It must be noted that the idea was not entirely new. The first
classification of parts of speech was homogeneous: in ancient Greek
grammar the words were subdivided mainly on the basis of their formal
properties into changeable and unchangeable; nouns, adjectives and
numerals were treated jointly as a big class of “names” because
they shared the same morphological forms. This classical linguistic
tradition was followed by the first English grammars: Henry Sweet
divided all the words in English into “declinables” and
“indeclinables”.
-
Alternative
approaches to the traditional classification of the parts of speech
H.
Sweet is a prominent English grammarian. His “New English Grammar,
Logical and Historical” (1891) is an attempt of a descriptive
grammar intended to break away from the canons of classical Latin
grammar and to give scientific explanation to grammatical phenomena.
His classification of parts of speech makes distinction between: 1)
declinables: — noun-words: nouns, noun-pronouns, noun-numerals,
infinitives, gerunds; — adjective-words: adjectives,
adjective-pronouns, adjective-numerals, participles; — verbs: finite
verbs, verbals (infinitive, participle, gerund); 2) indeclinables
(particles): adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections. H.
Sweet could not fully disentangle himself from the rules of classical
grammar (Greek, Latin).
In
“The Philosophy of Grammar” (1924) he presents his Theory of
Three Ranks describing the hierarchy of syntactic relations
underlying linear representation of elements in language structures.
The theory is based on the concept of determination. The “rank”
of a word (primary, secondary, or tertiary) depends upon its relation
(that of defined or defining) to other words in a sentence.
Nothing
cardinally different from the traditional approach in the
part-of-speech classification was produced by various English
grammars within the period between the works of O. Jespersen and the
appearance of Ch. Fries’s book “The Structure of English”
(1952). Ch. Fries belongs to the American school of descriptive
linguistics for which the starting point and basis of any linguistic
analysis is the distribution of elements. In contrast to other
representatives of that school, who excluded meaning from linguistic
description, Fries recognized its importance. He introduced the
notion of structural meaning as different from the lexical meaning of
words. In his opinion, the grammar of the language consists of the
devices that signal structural meanings.
So a part of speech,
according to Ch. Fries, is a functional pattern. All the words which
can occupy the same ‘set of positions’ in the pattern of English
utterances must belong to same part of speech. Fries recorded 50
hours of conversation by 300 different speakers and analyzed 250.000
word entries. As a result of this analysis he singles out four
wordclasses (1, 2, 3, and 4) and 15 subclasses of function words
(designated by the letters of Latin alphabet), in which the
properties of different word-classes, which are singled out by
traditional grammar, are dissolved in the distributional patterns.
Ch. Fries’s book presents a major linguistic interest as an
experiment rather than for its achievements.
-
Categorial
meaning of English nouns. Their lexical / grammatical subclasses and
morphemic structure.
In
English, the noun is characterized by the categorial meaning
of substantivity or thingnesswhich is perceived in any noun
irrespective of the form and lexical meaning: e.g.worker,
teacher, doctor as doer of action; book,
chair, house as a separate thing; rain,
water, snow as natural phenomenon; love,
beauty, generosity as an abstract notion, and so on.
The main paradigmatic classes are found possible to
distinguish:commonnouns andpropernouns.
Common
nouns:
Concrete –
denoting single physical objects (animate or inanimate) having a
certain shape and measurements (e.g. table, pupil,
lamp, dog);
Collective –
denoting a group of objects (animate or inanimate) or paired objects
(e.g. family, crew, delegation, government staff,
jury, jeans, earrings, trousers);
Mass – denoting
a physical substance having no particular shape or measurements
(e.g. bread, sugar, copper, wine, snow, air,
milk);
Abstract –
denoting abstracted states, qualities, feelings (e.g. kindness,
adoration, length, knowledge, delight, confidence, experience).
As
far as proper nounsare concerned,
they split into some common subclasses as well indicating names
of people, nationalities(the
British, Ukrainians, Russian), family names
(Byron, Adams, Newton), geographical
names(the Black Sea, Chicago, Moscow, the Pacific
ocean), names of companies, hotels, newspapers,
journals (Ford, the Daily News, the Hilton).
There
is some peculiarity in the realization of the meaning of number and
quantity in some groups of nouns in English. Firstly, a noun with the
same form can have different kinds of meanings and, therefore, can
function differently: concrete/abstract: a
beauty – beauty, красавица – красота; an
authority – authority, влиятельный человек –
влияние; a witness – witness, свидетель –
свидетельство; concrete
thing/material: a lemon – lemon,
лимон – сок; a chicken – chicken, цыпленок –
мясо; an iron – iron, утюг – железо; a wood –
wood, лес – древесина. Secondly, collective nouns may
be used both in singular and in plural (when the constituent members
of these collective nouns are meant): e.g. The
crew are operating perfectly / The crew is excellent. The family go
on holiday every summer / His family is not big.
Taking
into account the substantive featuring of a noun, it is possible to
identify its functional role in
forming a sentence pattern: subject(The
company is based in the capital
city), object(We
visited museums), predicative (He
is anoffice worker), attribute(I
like sea coast villages), adverbial
modifier (There were a lot of people at
the airport).
As
a part of speech the noun is described in its peculiarity as a word
with a specific morphemic structurecreated with
noun-forming derivational means, among
themaffixationandcompounding:
prefixes:
co-, ex-, over-, post-, under-, dis-, im-, un-:
e.g. co-operation,
ex-president, overeating, underestimation, postgraduate,
disagreement, impossibility, unimportance;
suffixes:
-ee, -er, -age, -ance, -tion, -ence, -ment, -cy, -ity, -hood, -ness,
-ship:
e.g. employee,
worker, breakage, annoyance, organization, preference, amazement,
fluency, popularity, childhood, kindness, friendship;
compounding:
adjective
+ noun: e.g. greenhouse, heavyweight, blackboard,
self-confidence, rush hours, safety belt;
noun
+ noun: e.g. cupboard, rainforest, countryside, chairman,
teapot, earthquake, saucepan;
gerund
+ noun: e.g. frying pan, drinking water, shaving cream,
working hours, chewing gum, writing paper, walking stick.
-
Morphological
categories of English nouns; the problematic status of gender
Morphological
features of the noun. In accordance with the morphological
structure
of the stems all nouns can be classified into: simple, derived (stem
+affix, affix + stem – thingness); compound (stem+ stem –
armchair ) and
composite
(the Hague). The noun has morphological categories of number and
case.
Some scholars admit the existence of the category of gender.
Gender.
In
Indo-European languages the category of gender is presented with
flexions.
It is not based on sex distinction, but it is purely grammatical.
According
to some language analysts (B.Ilyish, F.Palmer,
and
E.Morokhovskaya),
nouns have no category of gender in Modern English. Prof.
Ilyish
states that not a single word in Modern English shows any
peculiarities in its
morphology
due to its denoting male or female being. Thus, the words husband
and
wife do not show any difference in their forms due to peculiarities
of their
lexical
meaning. The difference between such nouns as actor and actress is a
purely
lexical one.
Gender
distinctions in English are marked for a limited number of nouns. In
present-day
English there are some morphemes which present differences between
masculine
and feminine (waiter – waitress, widow – widower). This
distinction is
not
grammatically universal. Only a limited number of words are
marked
as belonging to masculine, feminine or neuter. The morpheme on which
the
distinction between masculine and feminine is based in English is a
word-
building
morpheme, not form-building.
Still,
other scholars (M.Blokh, John Lyons) admit the existence of the
category
of gender. Prof. Blokh states that the existence of the category of
gender
in
Modern English can be proved by the correlation of nouns with
personal
pronouns
of the third person (he, she, it). Accordingly, there are three
genders in
English:
the neuter (non-person) gender, the masculine gender, the feminine
gender.
-
Syntactic
functions of the English noun.
Syntactic
features of the noun. The noun can be used in the sentence in all
syntactic
functions but predicate. Speaking about noun combinability, we can
say
that
it can go into right-hand and left-hand connections with practically
all parts of
speech.
That is why practically all parts of speech but the verb can act as
noun
determiners.
However, the most common noun determiners are considered to be
articles,
pronouns, numerals, adjectives and nouns themselves in the common and
genitive
case.
-
The
category of case of English nouns. Meaning of case (R.Quirk et al).
The six cases of nouns (Charles Fillmore).
is
the morphological category of the noun manifested in the forms of
noun declension and showing the relations of the nounal referent to
other objects and phenomena. is a very speculative issue,
so
different scholars stick to a different number of cases. The
following four approaches, advanced at various times by different
scholars
Theory
of positional cases J.
C. Nesfield, M. Deutchbein,
M.
Bryant et
al follow the patterns of classical Latin grammar, distinguishing
-
NOMINATIVE
(case corresponds with the subject), -
GENITIVE,
DATIVE
(indirect object),
-
ACCUSATIVE
(direct object),
-
VOCATIVE
(with the address). -
“The
theory of positional cases” presents an obvious confusion of the
formal, morphological characteristics of the noun and its
functional, syntactic features.
Theory
of prepositional cases
(G.
Curme)
-
Latin-oriented,
dased on old school grammar traditions: treats the combinations of
nouns with prepositions as specific analytical case forms, -
e.g.:
the DATIVE case is expressed by nouns with the prepositions ‘to’
and
‘for’, -
the
GENITIVE case by nouns with the preposition ‘of’,
the instrumental case by nouns with the preposition ‘with’,
e.g.: for
the girl, of the girl, with a key. -
Theory
of limited case H.
Sweet, O. Jespersen,
developed by Russian linguists A.
Smirnitsky, L. Barkhudarov
-
the
most widely accepted theory of case in English -
The
category of case is realized in full in animate nouns and
restrictedly in inanimate nouns in English, hence the name – “the
theory of limited case” -
the
category of case is expressed by the opposition of two forms: the
first form, “the
genitive case”,
is the strong member of the opposition, marked by the postpositional
element ‘–s’
after
an apostrophe in the singular and just an apostrophe in the plural;
the second, unfeatured form is the weak member of the opposition
and is usually referred to as “the
common case”
(“non-genitive”).
-
“the
theory of the possessive postposition” G. N. Vorontsova, A. M.
Mukhin -
The
main arguments to support this point: first, the postpositional
element ‘s
is not only used with words, but also with the units larger than the
word, with word-combinations and even sentences, e.g.: his
daughter Mary’s arrival, the man I saw yesterday’s face
In
present-day linguistics case is used in two senses: 1) semantic, or
logic, and 2) syntactic.
The semantic case concept was
developed by C. J. Fillmore in the late 1960s. Ch. Fillmore
ntroduced syntactic-semantic classification of cases. They show
relations in the so-called deep structure of the sentence. According
to him, verbs may stand to different relations to nouns. There are 6
cases:
1.
Agentive Case (A) John opened the door;
2.
Instrumental case (I) The key opened the door; John used the key to
open the door;
3.
Dative Case (D) John believed that he would win (the case of the
animate being affected by the state of action identified by the
verb);
4.
Factitive Case (F) The key was damaged (the result of the action or
state identified by the verb);
5.
Locative Case (L) Chicago is windy;
6.
Objective case (O) John stole the book.
Case
expresses the relation of a word to another word in the word-group or
sentence (my sister’s coat). The category of case correlates with
the objective category of possession. The case category in English is
realized through the opposition: The Common Case :: The Possessive
Case (sister :: sister’s). However, in modern linguistics the term
“genitive case” is used instead of the “possessive case”
because the meanings rendered by the “`s” sign are not only those
of possession. The scope of meanings rendered by the Genitive Case is
the following:
1.
Possessive Genitive : Mary’s father – Mary has a father,
2.
Subjective Genitive: The doctor’s arrival – The doctor has
arrived,
3.
Objective Genitive : The man’s release – The man was released,
4.
Genitive of origin: the boy’s story – the boy told the story,
5.
Descriptive Genitive: children’s books – books for children
6.
Genitive of measure and partitive genitive: a mile’s distance, a
day’s trip
7.
Appositive genitive: the city of London.
-
Categorial
status of English articles.
The
question is whether the article is a separate part of speech (i.e. a
word) or a word-morpheme. If we treat the article as a word, we shall
have to admit that English has only two articles — the and a/an. But
if we treat the article as a word- morpheme, we shall have three
articles — the, a/an,
B.Ilyish
(1971:57) thinks that the choice between the two alternatives remains
a matter of opinion. M.Blokh (op. cit., 85) regards the article as a
special type of grammatical auxiliary. Linguists are only agreed on
the function of the article: the article is a determiner, or a
restricter.
The
articles, according to some linguists, do not form a grammatical
category. The articles, they argue, do not belong to the same lexeme,
and they do not have meaning common to them: a/an has the meaning of
oneness, not found in the, which has a demonstrative meaning.
If
we treat the article as a morpheme, then we shall have to set up a
grammatical category in the noun, the category of determination. This
category will have to have all the characteristic features of a
grammatical category: common meaning + distinctive meaning. So what
is common to a room and the room? Both nouns are restricted in
meaning, i.e. they refer to an individual member of the class ‘room’.
What makes them distinct is that a room has the feature [-Definite],
while the room has the feature [+Definite]. In this opposition the
definite article is the strong member and the indefinite article is
the weak member.