Grammatical meaning

1. GRAMMATICAL MEANING.
GRAMMATICAL CATEGORIES.
The notion of ‘grammatical meaning’
Types of grammatical meaning
Grammatical categories.
The notion of opposition.
Transposition and neutralization of
morphological forms.

2. 3 fundamental notions of
grammar:
grammatical form,
grammatical meaning
grammatical category

3. Word
is the main expressive unit of human
language which ensures the thought-
forming function of the language.
is also the basic nominative unit of
language with the help of which the
naming function of language is realized.

4. Word
is the main unit of traditional grammatical
theory.
is a level unit. In the structure of language
it belongs to the upper stage of the
morphological level.
is a unit of the sphere of ‘language’ and it
exists only through its speech
actualization.

5. Characteristic features of the word
indivisibility
 a bilateral entity

6. The notion of ‘grammatical
meaning’
The word’s
semantic structural
meanings
grammatical lexical

7. The semantic structure of the
word
Lexical meaning
is the individual
meaning of the
word
Grammatical
meaning is the
meaning of the
whole class or a
subclass.

8. The word “table”
Lexical meaning
Its individual lexical
meaning
corresponds to a
definite piece of
furniture
Grammatical meaning
 It’s the one of thingness
as the meaning of the
whole class.
The noun ‘table’ has the
grammatical meaning of
a subclass –
countableness.

9. A verb
Verbiality – the ability
to denote actions or states.
An adjective
Qualitativeness – the ability
to denote qualities.
Adverbs
Adverbiality – the ability
to denote quality of qualities.

10. oats and wheat
foliage and leaves
hair and волосы
bull - cow
author – authoress

11. pens –meaning of plurality; indicator – the
morpheme
has been working – the grammatical form
indicates continuity and perfection
‘s - The grammatical meaning is here motivated.
It shows relations of objects in extra-linguistic
world:
Peter’s head (part of a whole)
Peter’s arrival (subjective Genitive relations)
Peter’s arrest (objective Genitive relations)

12. does,
larger,
me
The book reads well.
Reads – is read, read
– are read (the
category of voice)

13. Types of grammatical meaning
GRAMMATICAL MEANING

EXPLICIT IMPLICIT


GENERAL DEPENDENT

14. Types of grammatical meaning
Explicit
The explicit grammatical
meaning is always marked
morphologically – it has its
marker.
e.g. cats - the grammatical
meaning of plurality is shown in
the form of the noun with -s;
cat’s – the grammatical
meaning of possessiveness is
shown by the form ‘s;
is asked – shows the explicit
grammatical meaning of
passiveness.
Implicit
The implicit
grammatical
meaning is not
expressed formally
e.g. the word table
does not contain
any hints in its form
as to it being
inanimate).

15. Types of the implicit grammatical meaning
The general
grammatical meaning
is the meaning of the
whole word-class, of a
part of speech
e.g. verbs – the
general meaning of
verbiability
nouns – the general
grammatical meaning
of thingness.
The dependent grammatical
meaning is the meaning of a
subclass within the same part of
speech.
e.g. any verb possesses the
dependent grammatical meaning
of transitivity/intransitivity,
terminativeness/non-
terminativeness, stativeness/non-
stativeness;
nouns have the dependent
grammatical meaning of
contableness/uncountableness
and animateness/inanimateness

16. The dependent grammatical meaning
influences the realization of grammatical
categories restricting them to a subclass.
e.g. the dependent grammatical meaning
of countableness/uncountableness
influences the realization of the
grammatical category of number

17. Different modes of expressing
grammatical meaning

inflexions (work-er-o – work-er-s). Homonymy
of grammatical morphemes (-ing – Gerund and
Participle I);
sound alternation ( man – men, have - has);
analytical means (analytical forms). Prof.
Barkhudarov: analytical forms are always
marked with the help of discontinuous
morphemes (have+ -en; be + -ing; be + -en).
suppletivity (I – me, go – went, bad - worse).

18. Criteria to differentiate analytical
forms:
The general grammatical meaning of an analytical
form comprises all the components of the form.
Each component taken separately doesn’t render
any information about the general meaning of the
form.
There are no syntactic relations between the
components of an analytical form. Originally they
developed from free syntactic combinations, mainly
from some types of compound predicates.
Syntactic relations in the context are possible only
for the whole form; the components can’t have
syntactic relations separately: has never done.

19. Grammatical categories.
Grammatical category is a system of
expressing a generalized grammatical meaning
by means of paradigmatic correlation of
grammatical forms.
The term ‘category’ derives from a Greek
word which is otherwise translated as
’predication’ (in the logical, or philosophical,
sense of ‘attributing properties’ to things).
Traditional categories are: the category of
gender, number, person, case, tense, mood,
voice.

20. Grammatical categories.
Their characteristical features
A grammatical category is a set of syntactic
features that
express meanings from the same
conceptual domain
occur in contrast to each other, and
are typically expressed in the same
fashion

21. Correlation of grammatical categories
Objective reality Objective category
Conceptual reality Lingual reality Conceptual category Grammatical category
Due to dialectal unity of language and thought,
grammatical categories correlate, on the one hand,
with the conceptual categories and, on the other
hand, with the objective reality.

22. Referential
grammatical categories.
are those that have references in the
objective reality
e.g.the objective category of time finds its
representation in the grammatical
category of tense,
the objective category of quantity finds its
representation in the grammatical
category of number.

23. Significational
grammatical categories
are those that do not correspond to anything
in the objective reality. Such categories
correlate only with conceptual matters.
Conceptual correlate
Lingual correlate

24. The notion of opposition.
The relation between two grammatical
forms differing in meaning and external
signs is called opposition –
e.g. book::books
(unmarked member/marked member).

25. As all grammatical categories find their
realization through oppositions, we may
define
the grammatical category as the
opposition between two mutually
exclusive form-classes
a form-class is a set of words with the same
explicit grammatical meaning.

26. Means of realization
of grammatical categories
Means of GC realization

synthetic analytic
(near – nearer) (beautiful – more beautiful).
sound alteration
(sing-sang-sung)
suppletivity
(good-better)

27. Transposition and neutralization of
morphological forms.
Transposition is the use of a linguistic
unit in an unusual environment or in the
function that is not characteristic of it .
e.g. He is a lion.
He is coming tomorrow

28. Transposition and neutralization of
morphological forms.
Neutralization is the reduction of the
opposition to one of its members
e.g. custom :: customs – x :: customs;
x :: spectacles.

29. Unanswered questions concerning the
role of grammatical category in
language processing
What is the role of grammatical category in
lexical, phrasal, and sentential processing?
How is grammatical category information
represented in the brain?
Are there distinct neural substrates underlying
the representation of nouns and verbs - along
semantic, grammatical, or lexical lines?
Are grammatical category effects due to an
interaction of the internal structure of words and
their processing implications?