Grammatical Categories of Number, Case, and Gender in Modern English. A Field Approach - Магистерская работа

Grammatical Categories of Number, Case, and Gender in Modern English. A Field Approach Contents Introduction Chapter 1. Grammatical Categories and Functional-Semantic Fields 1.1Nature of grammatical categories 1.2Typology of grammatical categories 1.3The theory of functional-semantic fields Chapter 2. The Categories of Number, Case, and Gender in Terms of Field Structure 2.1 Functional-semantic field of number in Modern English 2.2 Functional semantic field of case in Modern English 2.3 Functional-semantic field of gender in Modern English Conclusion References Summary Introduction The words of every language are divided into several word classes, or parts of speech, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives etc. The words of a given class exhibit two or more forms in somewhat different grammatical circumstances. These forms are not interchangeable and each can be used only in a given grammatical situation. This variation in form is required by the existence of a grammatical category applying to that class of words. Thus a grammatical category is a linguistic category which has the effect of modifying the forms of some class of words in a language [53, 32]. For example, English nouns have the grammatical category of number. Thus the singular `dog and the plural `dogs exist but are not interchangeable in a sentence. A noun can be used only in its singular or plural form as there is no possibility of another form. English adjectives vary for degree; verbs for tense; pronouns for case etc. Traditional grammarians divide the words of English into eight classes or parts of speech- noun, pronoun, adjective, verb, preposition, conjunction, adverb, etc. A grammatical category is an analytical class within the grammar of a language, whose members have the same syntactic distribution and recur as structural unit throughout the language, and which share a common property which can be semantic or syntactic. In traditional structural grammar, grammatical categories are semantic distinctions; this is reflected in a morphological or syntactic paradigm. But in generative grammar, which sees meaning as separate from grammar, they are categories that define the distribution of syntactic elements. For structuralists such as Roman Jakobson grammatical categories were lexemes that were based on binary oppositions of a single feature of meaning that is equally present in all contexts of use [51, 37]. Another way to define a grammatical category is as a category that expresses meanings from a single conceptual domain, contrasts with other such categories, and is expressed through formally similar expressions. Another definition distinguishes grammatical categories from lexical categories, such that the elements in a grammatical category have a common grammatical meaning - that is, they are part of the languages grammatical structure. The topic of this paper has been chosen to be “Grammatical Categories of Number, Case, and Gender in Modern English. A Field Approach”. The topicality of this work caused by several important points. The concept of ‘semantic field’, like the concept of ‘semantic frame’, opened up new domains of semantic research, first in Germany in the 1930s and then in the United States in the 1970s. Both concepts brought about ‘revolutions’ in semantics, and provided semanticists with new tools for the study of semantic change and semantic structure. Although there have been several historical accounts of the development of field semantics, there exists no detailed study linking and comparing the development of field and frame semantics. In this article we shall reconstruct the contexts in which the concepts of ‘field’ and ‘frame’ appeared for the first time and highlight the similarities as well as the differences between the semantic theories built on them. One of the main differences between the older and the modern traditions is that the latter no longer study how lexical fields carve up a relatively amorphous conceptual mass, as most older traditions had done, but how lexical fields are conceptually and pragmatically ‘framed’ by or grounded in our bodily, social and cultural experiences and practices. In doing so they establish forgotten links with certain communicational and functional conceptions of semantic fields developed in the past. The object of the investigation - grammatical categories of number, case, and gender in Modern English. The subject of the investigation - field approach to the study of the English language grammatical categories. Having based upon the actuality of the theme we are able to formulate the general goal of our qualification work - to investigate grammatical categories of number, case, and gender in Modern English with the field approach of the topic investigation. The tasks of the investigation are the following: - to investigate the nature of grammatical categories; - to consider typology of grammatical categories; - to characterize the theory of functional-semantic fields; - to an