Lecture 1 Fundamentals of grammar

Lecture 1
Fundamentals of grammar
1. Grammatical category. Grammatical meaning. Grammatical form.
2. Theory of oppositions. Types of oppositions. Oppositions in morphology.
3. Morpheme. Derivation morphemes and inflection morphemes.
4. Distributional analysis. Morphemic analysis. IC-analysis.


1. Grammatical category. Grammatical meaning. Grammatical form
The general notions of grammar which determine the structure of language
and find their expression in inflection and other devices are generally called
grammatical categories. As is known, a grammatical category is generally
represented by at least two grammatical forms, otherwise it cannot exist. A simple
case of oppositions in pairs of grammatical forms will be found, for instance,
between the Singular and the Plural in nouns, or between Active and Passive in
verbs. A grammatical category is a unit of grammar based on a morphological
opposition of grammatical meanings presented in grammatical forms.
It is more or less universally recognised that word-meaning is not
homogeneous but is made up of various components the combination and the
interrelation of which determine to a great extent the inner facet of the word. These
components are usually described as types of meaning. The two main types of
meaning that are readily observed are the grammatical and the lexical meanings to
be found in words and word-forms.
The most general meanings rendered by language and expressed by systemic
correlations of word-forms are interpreted in linguistics as grammatical meanings.
Grammatical meanings are very abstract, very general. Therefore the
grammatical form is not confined to an individual word, but unites a whole class of
words, so that each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical
meaning together with its individual, concrete semantics. Grammatical meanings
ranged in oppositions and presented in grammatical forms build grammatical
categories.