Lecture 1 Fundamentals of grammar

a black dress in severe style we do not relate a to black, black to dress,
dress to in, etc. but set up a structure which may be represented as a black dress /
in severe style. Thus the fundamental aim of IC analysis is to segment a set of
lexical units into two maximally independent sequences or ICs thus revealing the
hierarchical structure of this set. Successive segmentation results in Ultimate
Constituents (UC), i.e. two-facet units that cannot be segmented into smaller units
having both sound-form and meaning. The Ultimate Constituents of the word13
group analysed above are: a | black | dress | in | severe | style. The meaning of the
sentence, word-group, etc. and the IC binary segmentation are interdependent. For
example, fat major’s wife may mean that either ‘the major is fat’ or ‘his wife is
fat’. The former semantic interpretation presupposes the IC analysis into fat
major’s | wife, whereas the latter reflects a different segmentation into IC’s and
namely fat | major’s wife.


Lecture 2
The Parts of Speech Problem. Grammatical Classes of Words
The parts of speech are classes of words, all the members of these classes
having certain characteristics in common which distinguish them from the
members of other classes. The problem of word classification into parts of speech
still remains one of the most controversial problems in modern linguistics. The
attitude of grammarians with regard to parts of speech and the basis of their
classification varied a good deal at different times. Only in English grammarians
have been vacillating between 3 and 13 parts of speech. There are four approaches
to the problem:
1. Classical, or logical-inflectional, worked out by prescriptivists
2. Functional, worked out by descriptivists
3. Distributional, worked out by structuralists
4. Complex