The grammatical meaning of the sentence
A sentence has a meaning of its own, independent of the lexical meaning of the words in it. This meaning is signaled by the word order, the prepositions or the articles, the meaning is called the grammatical meaning of the sentence. The idea of the grammatical meaning of the sentence was introduced by Academician Sherba who gave his famous example of the grammatical meaning in the, non-sensical sentence:
1 actor 2 actions in the past 2 objects
Глокая куздра штека будланула бокра и куздрячит бокрёнка.
Charles Fries also analysed the grammatical meaning of the sentence. His non-sensical sentence was:
Woggles agged diggles.
Actors Action Things acted upon
We can change the question into a sentence, we can make the sentence negative, we can change the tense of the verb, but the grammatical meaning of the sentence is the same.
The grammatical meaning of the sentence - The book is interesting - is the thing and its quality. The grammatical meaning of the sentence - She runs, fast - will be-actor, action, the quality of the action. The fact that each sentence has a grammatical meaning of its own makes it possible to represent a model of the sentence with the help of the symbols NVAD: The team was there. The concert was good.
N V D N V A
It is also possible to make up sentences according to a given model;
NVNN-My mother cooks breakfast and lunch. He sent her a telegram.
N of N - a leg of a table, a glass of milk, a face of a woman.
Symbols of the sentence and word-combinations are often used in modern linguistics.
GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES AHD GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES
The most general meanings rendered by the language and expressed by systematic correlations of forms of the words are called categorial grammatical meanings. The grammatical category is a system which expressed a generalized grammatical meaning by means of paradigmatic correlations of grammatical forms: the category of number, the category of degree of comparison, etc. In the English language grammatical categories are most often expressed by binary privative oppositions of forms, the Russian term is бинарные привативные оппозиции / table - tables, wrote - was written/
In the binary privative opposition one member is called the marked member of the opposition and the second member is called the unmarked. The marked member of the opposition is usually marked in form and has a definite grammatical meaning. The unmarked member of the opposition is not marked in form, it has not special grammatical ending and has a wide grammatical meaning. Thus in the example “table – tables” the plural form is the marked member of the opposition. It is marked in form because it has -s ending and in meaning because it denotes plurality. The singular form is the unmarked member of the opposition. It has no special ending and it doesn’t denote plurality.
The grammatical category usually refers to the whole class of words: the category of case is the category of the noun, the category of voice is the category of the verb.
Grammatical categories are expressed by means of grammatical morphemes. There are the following grammatical morphemes in English:
1. Overt morphemes are different grammatical inflexions: books, arrived, shorter
2. Covered morphemes, they include sound interchange, there may be inner inflexions where there is vowel interchange: foot - feet, write - wrote and consonant interchange: life - lives, wolf -wolves. Sometimes vowel interchange may be combined with adding inflexions: write – written, child - children
3. Suppletive morphemes - when the forms of one and the same word are formed from different roots: go - went, good - better, be - was
4. Discontinuous morphemes (written – morpheme – всё слово – корневая морфема)
- is ... - ing has … ed
is reading has asked
They consist of the auxiliary verb and the overt morpheme or covered morpheme. We have discontinuous morphemes in analytical forms.
5. Zero morphemes are the absence of a morpheme. The absence of a morpheme may indicate a certain meaning, e.g. The forms books and book are both formed from the stem book. In the form books we have an overt morpheme which shows that the noun is in the plural, in the form book we have a zero morpheme which shows that the noun is in the singular.
THE NOUN
1. Meaning. Nouns denote thingness.
2. Form. Houns have the grammatical categories of case and number.
3. Function. The noun is a polyfunctional part of speech. Nouns are used in the functions of all the parts of the sentence:
The girl is a beauty - subject, predicative
I advise you to read the book “The woman of substance” - attribute
She gave her friend an interesting book to read - object
We live in Moscow - an adverbial modifier of place
Besides nouns can be used in the functions of prepositions and conjunctions
He smiled the moment he saw me – conjunction - when
Please, wait for me in case I am late - conjunction – if I know noting with regard to that matter – preposition – about Nouns which are used in the functions of conjunctions and prepositions have a tendency to change into conjunctions and prepositions.