Ответы на билеты по дисциплине

1. The term “grammar” goes back to a Greek word that may be translated as the “art of writing”. But later this word acquired a much wider sense and came to embrace the whole study of language. Now it is often used as the synonym of linguistics. A question comes immediately to mind: what does this study involve?
Grammar may be practical and theoretical. The aim of practical grammar is the description of grammar rules that are necessary to understand and formulate sentences. The aim of theoretical grammar is to offer explanation for these rules. Generally speaking, theoretical grammar deals with the language as a functional system.
Grammars are of different kinds. A fully explicit grammar exhaustively describing the grammatical constructions of a language is called a descriptive grammar. It does not teach the rules of the language; it describes the rules that are already known. In other words, a descriptive grammar of language does not tell you how you should speak; it only describes your unconscious linguistic knowledge. Such a grammar is a model of the mental grammar every speaker of the language knows. A grammar that attempts to legislate what your grammar should be is called a prescriptive grammar. From ancient times until the present, “purists” have believed that language change is corruption, and that there are certain “correct” forms that all educated people should use in speaking and writing. So, if the descriptive grammar only describes your unconscious linguistic knowledge, the prescriptive grammar tells what rules you should know to speak the standard language. Prescriptivists blame television, schools and even the National Council of Teachers of English for failing to preserve the standard language and they attack those college and university professors who suggest that African American English (AAE) and other dialects are viable, living languages. Yet, the majority of linguists think that language is vigorous, dynamic and constantly changing. All languages and dialects are expressive, complete and logical. They are all rule governed and what is grammatical in one language may be ungrammatical in another equally prestigious language. These scholars admit that the grammar and usage of standard English may be dominant for social and political reasons, but other dialects are linguistically equally complex, logical and capable of producing an infinite set of sentences to express any thought. If sentences are muddled, it is not because of the language but because of the speakers. No grammar, therefore no language, is either superior or inferior to any other. Languages of technologically undeveloped cultures are not grammatically primitive or illformed in any way.
2. An analytic language is any language where syntax and meaning are shaped more by use of particles and word order rather than by inflection. The opposite of an analytic language is a synthetic language.
Features of analytic languages
Analytic languages often express abstract concepts using independent words, while synthetic languages tend to use adpositions, affixes and internal modifications of roots for the same purpose.
Analytic languages have stricter and more elaborate syntactic rules. Since words are not marked by morphology showing their role in the sentence, word order tends to carry a lot of importance; for example, Chinese and English make use of word order to show subject–object relationship. Chinese also uses word order to show definiteness (where English uses the and a), topic–comment relationships, the role of adverbs (whether they are descriptive or contrastive), and so on.
Analytic languages tend to rely heavily on context and pragmatic considerations for the interpretation of sentences, since they do not specify as much as synthetic languages in terms of agreement and cross-reference between different parts of the sentence.
A synthetic language, in linguistic typology, is a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. This linguistic classification is largely independent of morpheme-usage classifications (such as fusional, agglutinative, etc.), although there is a common tendency for agglutinative languages to exhibit synthetic properties.
Synthetic languages are numerous and well-attested, the most commonly cited being Indo-European languages such as Greek, Latin, German, Italian, Russian, Polish and Czech, as well as many languages of the Americas, including Navajo, Nahuatl, Mohawk and Quechua. It is likely that Interlingua can be considered a synthetic language.
3. Grammatical forms can be morphemes, synthetic forms, and grammatical word combinations, which are analytical forms. Synthetic forms unite both lexical and grammatical meanings in one word. In analytical forms there two or more words in which at least one element is an auxiliary. The auxiliary is a constant element of an analytical structure, which is devoid of lexical meaning (it renders grammatical meanings and is a purely grammatical element). Analytical structures must be differentiated from free syntactical word combinations. In free syntactical word combinations all the elements possess both lexical and grammatical meanings.
Cf. waiter and waitress
Types of word-form derivation
These fall under two main headings:
(a) those limited to changes in the body of the word, without having
recourse to auxiliary words (synthetic types),
(b) those implying the use of auxiliary words (analytical types).
Besides, there are a few special cases of different forms of a word being derived from altogether different stems.
4. The subject is the principal part of the sentence which is grammatically independent of the other parts of the sentence. The subject can denote a living being, a lifeless thing or an idea. It can be expressed by: 1. A noun in the common (nominative) case. 2. A pronoun – personal, demonstrative, defining, indefinite, negative, possessive, interrogative. 3. A substantivized adjective or participle. 4. A numeral. 5. An infinitive, an infinitive phrase or construction. 6. A gerund, a gerundial phrase or construction. 7. Any part of speech used as a quotation, or a quotation group. 8. A group of words which is one part of the sentence, i.e. a syntactically indivisible group.
5. Th e order of words9 is a subject of great interest. Unfortunately it is not always conceived in a suffi ciently wide perspective. It can be treated from two diff erent viewpoints. First, we can examine what position a particular sentence element usually occupies or, more exactly, what are the mutual positions of two particular sentence elements, the subject and the predicate, the object and the predicative verb, etc. Th e second approach consists in examining the general factors that determine the order of words in a sentence. Th e latter approach seems to be more expedient in as much as it shows that the arrangement of the words in a sentence is not determined by one principle, but results from the operation of several confl icting principles. Th e coexistence of several word order principles in a language is easily obscured if word order issues are treated in the former manner. Th is can be seen in the treatment of Czech word order in Ertl’s edition of Gebauer’s Czech Grammar (J. Gebauer – V. Ertl, 1914). Th e chapter on word order is one of the weakest parts of this otherwise valuable book, not only for lack of lucidity in the exposition but also because the presentation of Czech word order is entirely misleading. Czech word order is very fl exible. It is oft en referred to by the term “free”. Th is term, however, is objectionable, for it suggests that Czech word order is completely arbitrary, which is not correct. As has been said, it is fl exible, which is manifest especially in comparison with the word order of English. What are the principles that govern the word order of a particular language, oft en in a confl icting manner? Th e fi rst principle might be called grammatical. It means that the position of a particular sentence element is determined by its grammatical function, i.e. by its being the subject, predicate, object, adverbial, etc.