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INTRODUCTION
The purpose of this manual is to present a systematic study of the grammatical structure of Modern English. It presupposes a sufficient knowledge on the part of the reader of the practical rules pertaining both to the morphology and to the syntax of the language.
A peculiarity of the modern trend of linguistics is the desire to arrive at results independent of the view of a particular scholar. There can hardly be any doubt that the ability to arrive at such results would mark a significant advance in linguistics, which has far too long been suffering from conflicts between contradictory views put forward by various authors and disputed by others. As far as can be foreseen at the moment, the area of objective results not to be disputed will gradually increase at the expense of the debated area, which, however, can hardly be expected ever to disappear altogether. In discussing this or that particular problem in this manual, we will try to define what can be said to be firmly established and what remains controversial.
A word is necessary here about the limits of grammar as part of a language's structure and the other aspects (or "levels") of language, viz. the phonetic (phonological) and the lexical.
It need hardly be emphasised that a language is a whole consisting of parts closely united. The linguist's task is, accordingly, to point out the demarcation line separating those aspects or levels from one another, on the one hand, and the connections between them, on the other. This is by no means an easy task, as we shall more than once have occasion to observe. Our subject is the grammatical structure of English, and we shall have to delineate the borderlines and connections between grammatical structure, on the one hand, and phonetics (phonology) and the vocabulary, on the other.
In discussing grammatical categories, we shall often have to mention oppositions, that is, pairs of grammatical forms opposed to each other in some way. A simple case in point is the opposition between the singular and the plural number in nouns, with their definite meanings: one as against more than one.
As the teaching of a language to foreigners requires the formulation of rules which the learner has to observe if he is to speak and write the language correctly, practical grammars, written both by speakers of the language in question and by foreigners, tend to be excessively strict in laying down what is "inadmissible" in the language.
Now, features distinguishing the Modern English language from, say, Modern French, are also fairly numerous.
Without going into more minute details, it may be pointed out here that English adjectives are not inflected for either gender or number, whereas French adjectives are, or that English has no future tense formed without auxiliary verbs, whereas French has one, or again, that in English the attributive adjective (with a few exceptions) comes before its noun, whereas in French such an adjective (with a few exceptions, too) comes after it, etc. These examples may be sufficient to show that by calling the English language analytical we do not give an adequate description of its structure. We shall arrive at that adequate description only at the end of the course.
The syntactical part will consist of two very unequal items: the theory of phrases and the theory of the sentence. These parts are bound to be unequal because the theory of phrases (in its syntactical aspect) seems to be the least developed element of English grammar, whereas the theory of the sentence has a long-drawn-out and fruitful history.
The phrase theory will have to deal with the various types of phrases (noun and verb, verb and adverb, etc.) in their grammatical, as distinct from their lexical, aspect. The theory of the sentence will include a review of the types of simple sentence and parts of the sentence, and of the various types of composite sentences.
Though the difference and the boundary between morphology and syntax seem obvious enough as a matter of principle, drawing a clear-cut line between them in a given language sometimes proves to be a task of some difficulty. Let us consider a few cases of this kind in Modern English.
The usual definition of morphology, which may be accepted as it stands, is this: Morphology is the part of grammar which treats of the forms of words. As for the usual definition of syntax, it may be said to be this: Syntax is the part of grammar which treats of phrases and sentences.
According to a modern view, the relation between morphology and syntax is not so simple as had been generally assumed. In this view, we ought to distinguish between two angles of research:
The elements dealt with; from this point we divide grammatical investigation into two fields: morphology and syntax.
The way these elements are studied; from this viewpoint we distinguish between paradigmatic and syntagmatic study. Thus we get four divisions:
а) paradigmatic morphology; b syntagmatic morphology;
a paradigmatic syntax; b syntagmatic syntax.
According to this view, whenever we talk of parts of speech (substantives, adjectives, etc.), we remain within the sphere of morphology. Thus the statement that an adjective is used to modify a substantive, or that an adverb is used to modify a verb, is a statement of syntagmatic morphology. Syntax should have nothing to do with parts of speech: it should only operate with parts of sentence (subject, predicate, etc.).Of these four items, the first and the last require no special explanation. Paradigmatic morphology is what we used to call morphology, and syntagmatic syntax is what we used to call syntax. The two other items, however, do require some special comment. Syntagmatic morphology is the study of phrases: "substantive + substantive", "adjective + substantive", "verb + substantive", "verb + adverb", etc. Paradigmatic syntax, on the other hand, is a part of grammatical theory which did not appear as such in traditional systems.
In this course emphasis is made on nontradional deep syntaxsem analysis of sentence based on Professor A.M. Mukhin’s theory. The course is dedicated to such problems as distributional, transformational or the method of experiment, componentional and syntactic-semantic analysis.
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