Download Grammatical Categories and Markers

Grammatical Categories and
Markers
Lecture 2
Units of grammar
• The smallest unit of meaning is the morpheme.
morpheme
word
the smallest
grammatical unit
phrase
sentence
the largest
grammatical unit
Figure 1: Grammatical units
Morphology is the study of word structure.
flower, enjoyment, boys, кон, коне
• Free morphemes
• Bound morphemes
• Roots
• Affixes (derivational,
inflectional)
Suffixes are affixes
which attach to the
end of words.
Prefixes which stand
in front of the root
morpheme.
• enjoyment
• vocational
• gramm-atic-al-iz-ation
• They do not make the
word change its class, but
change its meaning.
• dis-mount, un-lock
• Suffixes may be
derivational (i.e. the
examples above) or
inflectional.
• They belong to the
category of derivational
affixes.
Grammatical markers
• All the grammatical forms of the word build
up its grammatical paradigm.
• Grammatical paradigms express categorial
meaning through their functional oppositions
(Blokh 1983).
• There are binary and ternary oppositions.
• 3rd p. sg. ↔ non-3rd p. sg.
Grammatical forms can be synthetical and
analytical.
• Synthetical forms, e.g. big – bigger –
biggest or change of the root morpheme
(suppletivity), e.g. swim – swam – swum.
• Analytical forms (+an auxiliary word),
e.g. difficult – more difficult – most difficult.
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?
• Which are the grammatical categories of
the verb in English and Bulgarian?
In English grammatical markers are
considerably less than in Bulgarian.
J.Molhova: a grammatical morpheme
has several grammatical meanings
The adjectival suffix -er has the following two
meanings:
1. adjective;
2. comparative degree.
Types of distribution
• The distribution of a lingual unit depends
on the different environments of that unit.
• phonemic distribution of morphemes, e.g.
fans, faxes
• morphemic distribution of morphemes,
e.g. boxes, oxen
3 types of distribution (Blokh 2000)
• contrastive (e.g. plays ↔ played)
• non-contrastive (e.g. burned = burnt –
Past tense)
• complementary (e.g. books, boxes, oxen,
etc. - allomorphs)
Can you find some examples of homonymy
with the grammatical suffixes?
• the substantival suffix -s marking the plural
of some noun
game-games
is homonymous with
• the verbal suffix -s, marking the 3rd p. sg.
of the Present Simple Tense of the verb
work-works
Some other examples of homonymy with the
grammatical suffixes?
• the verbal suffix -ed marking the past
participle of the verb
work-worked
is an homonym with
• the verbal suffix -ed marking the Past
Simple Tense
work-worked
Some more examples of homonymy with the
grammatical suffixes?
• the substantival suffix -en marking the
plural form of some nouns
child-children
is an homonym with
• the verbal suffix -en marking the past
participle of some verbs
write-written
And more examples of homonymy with the
grammatical suffixes?
• the gerundial suffix -ing
reading
is an homonym with
• the suffix -ing marking the present participle
reading
Can you find some antonyms among the
grammatical markers?
• the presence of the -s morpheme marking
the plural form of the noun
could be considered to be an antonym to
• the zero morpheme pointing to the form of
the singular
table0º-tables
In traditional grammar three criteria are used to
divide the words into grammatical classes:
• semantic (the general meaning of all the words in a
class)
• formal (the grammatical forms of the words )
• functional (the syntactic positions of words )
On the basis of these criteria, words are
divided into
• notional grammatical classes = an
open-class subsystem (Internet, email,
website, reboot, download)
• functional series of words = a closedclass (grammatical) subsystem
Agreement (concord)
• She sings.
• those cats
Deictic categories:
• here – there
• this – that / these – those
• now – then
Levinson (1983) : Meet me here a week
from now with a stick about this big.