Brief contents of the course

Glossary of linguistic terms:

1. 
   subordinate clause – придаточное предложение
   
2. 
   subject clause – придаточное-подлежащее
   
3. 
   predicative clause – придаточное-сказуемое
   
4. 
   object clause – дополнительное придаточное
   
5. 
   attributive clause – определительное придаточное
   
6. 
   descriptive - неконкретизирующее
   
7. 
   restrictive (limitive) - конкретизирующее
   
8. 
   causal clause – придаточное причины
   
9. 
   temporal clause - временное придаточное
   
10. 
    clause of concession – придаточное уступки
    

Additional reading:

1. 
   стр. 275-328
   
2. 
   –
   
3. 
   –
   
4. 
   стр. 333-359
   
5. 
   стр. 379-394
   

Practical tasks:

19. 
    Define the types of clauses constituting the following sentences:
    

He knows exactly what to give a young gentleman with a headache.
Bertie turns to his valet every time he gets into trouble.
She was looking for the place where they might lunch, for Ashurst never looked for anything.

21. Correct the punctuation mistakes, if any, in the following sentences:

Lupin whose back was towards me did not hear me come in.
She hated him in despair that shuttered her and broke her down.
The wedding which only memebers of the family were invited to took place on Friday.
In fact it is he who had bought her the luxurious little villa in which we were now sitting.


XXXXVII. THE PROBLEM OF HIGHER SYNTACTICAL UNITS
This problem may be formulated as follows: is the sentence the highest existing syntactical unit, or are there higher syntactical units than the sentence — units of which a sentence is but a component part?
The traditional view of course is that the sentence is the highest syntactical unit and that whatever units we may find of a higher order will be not syntactical, but either stylistic, or literary.
What reasons are there, then, to suppose that there exists a grammatical, that is, a syntactical unit higher than the sentence, and how are the limits of this higher unit to be delineated?
Text is a coherent stretch of speech which is a semantico-topical and a syntactic unity, centered on a common informative purpose. Text can be interpreted as a lingual unity with its two distinguishing features: first semantic (topical) unity; second semantico-syntactic cohesion.
The primary division of sentence sequences in speech should be based on the communicative direction of their component sentences. From this point of view monologue sequences and dialogue sequences are to be discriminated.
In a monologue, sentences connected in a continual sequence are directed from one speaker to his one or several listeners. Thus, the sequence of this typed can be characterized as a one-direction sequence.:
We’ll have a lovely garden. We’ll have roses in it and daffodils and a lovely lawn with a swing for little Billy and little Barbara to play on. And we’ll have our meals down by the lily pond in summer.
The succession of sentences is called a “super-phrasal unity”.
As different from this, sentences in a dialogue sequence are uttered by the speakers-interlocutors in turn, so that they are directed, as it were, to meet one another; the sequence of this type is characterized as two-direction sequence:
“Annette, what have you done?” – “I’ve done what I had to do.”
The monologue text, or “discourse”, is then a topical entity; the dialogue text, or “conversation”, is an exchange-topical entity.
On the basis of the functional nature of connectors, cumulation of sentences is divided into two fundamental types: conjunctive cumulation and correlative cumulation.
Conjunctive cumulation is effected by conjunction-like connectors. To these belong, first, regular conjunctions, both coordinative and subordinative; second, adverbial and parenthetical sentence connectors (then, yet, however, consequently, hence, besides, morover, nevertheless). Adverbial and parenthetical sentence connectors may be both specialized, i.e. functional and semi-functional words, and non-specialized units performing the connective functions:
The two conjunctions that are especially frequent in this function are, and and but. The conjunction and is found in this function often enough, and some writers seem to have a special predilection for it.
Here is a typical example from Th. Dreiser's "An American Tragedy":They had been to all these wonderful places together. And now, without any real consciousness of her movements, she was moving from the chair to the edge of the bed, sitting with elbows on knees and chin in hands; or she was before the mirror or peering restlessly out intothe dark to see if there were any trace of day. And at six, and six-thirty when the light was just breaking and it was nearing time to dress, she was still up — in the chair, on the edge of the bed, in the corner before the mirror. But she had reached but one definite conclusion and that was that in some way she must arrange not to have Clyde leave her.
It might perhaps be said that the higher unit established by co-ordinating conjunctions is somewhat like what we call a "paragraph". But a conjunction of this kind may even be found at the beginning of a paragraph. Thus, in the passage just quoted the sentence And now, without any real consciousness... stands at the opening of a new paragraph, and so does the sentence beginning with But she had reached...
It is necessary to add something to the definition of a conjunction: a conjunction may unite words, parts of a sentence, clauses, and independent sentences as well.