Brief contents of the course

Glossary of Linguistic Terms

1. 
   Opposition – противопоставление двух или нескольких грамматических форм, объединенных в одну грамматическую категорию.
   
2. 
   synthetic form – синтетическая флома, образованная путем слияния основы и формообразующих аффиксов.
   
3. 
   productive/non-productive forms – продуктивные (широко используемые для образования новых слов и форм)/непродуктивные (не производящие новые слова и формы)
   
4. 
   bound morpheme – связанная морфема, которая может употребляться только как часть слова, а не самостоятельно
   
5. 
   homonymy – омонимия, употребление одинаковых по форме морфем для образования разных грамматических форм
   
6. 
   suppletive form – супплетивная форма, форма одного и того же слова, образованная от другого корня.
   
7. 
   sound alternations – чередование звуков, сопровождающее образование грамматических форм
   
8. 
   replacive morphemes – чередующиеся морфемы, который служат для образования грамматических форм путем замены одной или нескольких букв в корне.
   

Additional reading

1. 
   стр. 23-24,
   
2. 
   стр. 13
   
3. 
   стр. 84-90,
   
4. 
   стр. 27-29,
   
5. 
   стр. 65-78
   

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.