Microsoft Word Theoretical Course of English Grammar

Study questions: 
1.
Define the concept of a dictionary word. 
2.
Define the concept of a text word. 
3.
What is a grammatical paradigm of a lexeme (i.e. dictionary word)? 
4.
What do we call a word family? 
5.
Name the types of morphological relationship among words in modern English grammar 
and explain how they differ from each other. 
6.
What does morphology study? 
7.
When was the term “morphology” invented? What does it mean? 
8.
Define the concept of a morpheme. 
9.
Why is discreteness of speech so important? 
10.
Define the concept of a root. 
11.
Name the types of affixal morphemes and explain how they differ functionally? 
12.
How is a stem formed? 
13.
Characterize inflectional affixes. 
14.
How many inflectional affixes are there in modern English? 
15.
What kind of morphemes are called free morphemes? 
16.
What kind of morphemes are called bound morphemes? 
17.
Define the concept of allomorphs. 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
Script by prof. 
Nino Kirvalidze
18
Lecture 4 
Basic notions of morphology: grammatical category,
grammatical paradigm and paradigmatic opposition.
Ways of grammatical word-forming in modern English. 
Morphology is the study of internal structure of words and the rules by which words are 
formed. Notional words, first of all verbs and nouns, possess some morphemic features express-
ing grammatical (morphological) meanings and determining the grammatical form of the word.
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. So we can say that different grammatical forms express different grammatical 
meanings.
The most general notions reflecting the most general properties of phenomena are re-
ferred to as categorical notions or categories.
The most general meanings rendered by language and expressed by systemic correlations 
of grammatical word-forms are interpreted in linguistics as
categorical grammatical meanings
. 
The categorical meaning (e.g. the grammatical number) unites the individual meanings of the 
correlated paradigmatic forms (e.g. singular – plural) and is exposed through them.
The grammatical category is a system of concepts expressing a generalized grammatical 
meaning by means of paradigmatic correlation of grammatical forms.
The ordered set of grammatical word-forms of a lexeme expressing a categorical meaning 
constitutes a paradigm. The correlated word-forms within the paradigm are referred to as 
members of so-called grammatical opposition. 
The oppositional theory was originally formulated as a phonological theory, later it was 
introduced into morphology. The opposition (in the linguistic sense) may be defined as a 
generalized correlation of lingual forms by means of which a certain function (i.e. a grammati-
cal meaning) is expressed. 
The correlated elements (members) of the opposition must possess 
two types of features: common and differential.
Common features serve as the basis of contrast, 

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Theoretical Course of English Grammar 
Script by prof.