Grammatical Categories and Markers

Grammatical Categories and Markers

• Lecture 3

Which are the structural levels of language?

• phonological

• morphological

• syntactical

• lexico-semantical

Here we are interested in the grammatical level.

• Mincoff: every linguistic item is part of the grammatical structure of a language
• How do we express possession in English?
• my aunt’s book the marker of the Genitive case
• the book of my aunt a prepositional phrase introduced by of

How do we express possession in Bulgarian?

• лелината книга
• книгата на леля
• The same fact of possession has an entirely different expression in Bulgarian
• It is a question of the structure of Bulgarian language and not of the extralinguistic fact as such

The word has to be grammatically shaped in order to function in the language

• Which are the grammatical categories of the noun in English and Bulgarian?
• English noun Bulgarian noun
• number число
• case род
• gender

English verb Bulgarian verb

• English verb Bulgarian verb
• tense лице
• aspect число
• voice време
• наклонение
• In English grammatical markers are considerably less than in Bulgarian.
• In both languages they are less than the other types of morphemes

Name some grammatical markers

• noun
• -s
• -’s girl-girls girl’s-girls’
• verb
• -ing
• -ed play-playing-played
• adjective
• -er
• -est smart-smarter-smartest

J.Molhova: a grammatical morpheme has several grammatical meanings

• The simplest grammatical marker has at least two grammatical meanings:
• that of the class of words
• that of the specific category within it
• The adjectival suffix -er has the following two meanings
• adjective;
• comparative degree.