Modern british literature. The syntactico-distributional classification of words (ch

The syntactico-distributional classification of words (Ch. Fries). The combination of the syntactico-distributional and the traditional classifications: three main layers of lexicon. Supra/sub-classes of words. Functional differences between the three layers of lexicon. Intermediary phenomena between the three major layers.

Principles of grammatical classification of words. The traditional classification. Notional and functional parts of speech in the traditional classification. The problem of grammatical relevance of the traditional classification of parts of speech. Polydifferential and monodifferential (heterogeneous and homogeneous) classifications.

Traditionally, all parts of speech are subdivided on the upper level of classification into notional words and functional words. Notional words, which traditionally include nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns and numerals, have complete nominative meanings, are in most cases changeable and fulfill self-dependent syntactic functions in the sentence. The noun, for example, as a part of speech, is traditionally characterized by 1) the categorial meaning of substance (“thingness”), 2) a specific set of word-building affixes, the grammatical categories of number, case and article determination, prepositional connections and modification by an adjective, and 3) the substantive functions of subject, object or predicative in the sentence. In the same way, all the other notional parts of speech are described. Functional words, which include conjunctions, prepositions, articles, interjections, particles, and modal words, have incomplete nominative value, are unchangeable and fulfill mediatory, constructional syntactic functions.

Classifications in general may be based either on one criterion (such classifications are called homogeneous, or monodifferential), or on a combination of several criteria (such classifications are called heterogeneous, or polydifferential). The traditional classification of parts of speech is polydifferential (heterogeneous); it is based on the combination of all the three criteria mentioned above: ‘meaning – form – function’.

The employment of the three criteria combined, in present-day mainstream linguistics, was developed mainly by V. V. Vinogradov, L. V. Scherba, A. I. Smirnitsky, B. A. Ilyish and others.

There are certain limitations and controversial points in the traditional classification of parts of speech, which make some linguists doubt its scientific credibility.

First of all, the three criteria turn out to be relevant only for the subdivision of notional words. As for functional words – prepositions, conjunctions, particles, interjections, etc. – these classes of words do not distinguish either common semantic, or formal, or functional properties, they are rather characterized by the absence of all three criteria in any generalized form.

Second, the status of pronouns and the numerals, which in the traditional classification are listed as notional, is also questionable, since they do not have any syntactic functions of their own, but rather different groups inside these two classes resemble in their formal and functional properties different notional parts of speech: e.g., cardinal numerals function as substantives, while ordinal numerals function as adjectives; the same can be said about personal pronouns and possessive pronouns.

Third, it is very difficult to draw rigorous borderlines between different classes of words, because there are always phenomena that are indistinguishable in their status. E.g., non-finite forms of verbs, such as the infinitive, the gerund, participles I and II are actually verbal forms, but lack some of the characteristics of the verb: they have no person or number forms, no tense or mood forms, and what is even more important, they never perform the characteristic verbal function, that of a predicate. Equally dubious is the part-of-speech characterization of auxiliary verbs, intensifying adverbs, conjunctive adverbs and pronouns, and of many other groups of words which have the morphological characteristics of notional words, but play mediatory constructional functions in a sentence, like functional words. There are even words that don’t go to any classification at all; for example, many linguists doubt whether the words of agreement and disagreement, yes and no, can occupy any position in the classification of parts of speech.

These, and a number of other problems, made linguists search for alternative ways to classify lexical units. Some of them thought that the contradictions could be settled if parts of speech were classified following a strictly scientific approach, a unified basis of subdivision; in other words, if a homogeneous classification of parts of speech were undertaken.

It must be noted that the idea was not entirely new. The first classification of parts of speech was homogeneous: in ancient Greek grammar the words were subdivided mainly on the basis of their formal properties into changeable and unchangeable; nouns, adjectives and numerals were treated jointly as a big class of “names” because they shared the same morphological forms. This classical linguistic tradition was followed by the first English grammars: Henry Sweet divided all the words in English into “declinables” and “indeclinables”. But the approach which worked well for the description of highly inflectional languages turned out to be less efficient for the description of other languages.

The syntactic approach, which establishes the word classes in accord with their functional characteristics, is more universal and applicable to languages of different morphological types. The principles of a monodifferential syntactico-distributional classification of words in English were developed by the representatives of American Descriptive Linguistics, L. Bloomfield, Z. Harris and Ch. Fries.

Ch. Fries selected the most widely used grammatical constructions and used them as substitution frames: the frames were parsed into parts, or positions, each of them got a separate number, and then Ch. Fries conducted a series of substitution tests to find out what words can be used in each of the positions. Some of the frames were as follows: The concert was good (always). The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly). The team went there. All the words that can be used in place of the article made one group, the ones that could be used instead of the word “clerk” another, etc. The results of his experiments were surprisingly similar to the traditional classification of parts of speech: four main positions were distinguished in the sentences; the words which can be used in these positions without affecting the meaning of the structures were united in four big classes of words, and generally speaking coincide with the four major notional parts of speech in the traditional classification: nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs. Besides these “positional words” (“form-words”), Ch. Fries distinguished 15 limited groups of words, which cannot fill in the positions in the frames. These “function words” are practically the same as the functional words in the traditional classification.

The syntactico-distributional classification of words distinguished on a consistently syntactic basis testifies to the objective nature of the classification of parts of speech. More than that, in some respects the results of this approach turn out to be even more confusing than the “non-scientific” traditional classification: for example, Group A, embracing words that can substitute for the article “the” in the above given frames, includes words as diverse as “the, no, your, their, both, few, much, John’s, twenty”, or one word might be found in different distributional classes. Thus, the syntactico-distributional classification cannot replace the traditional classification of parts of speech, but the major features of different classes of words revealed in syntactico-distributional classification can be used as an important supplement to traditional classification.

The combination of syntactico-distributional and traditional classifications strongly suggests the subdivision of the lexicon into two big supra-classes: notional and functional words. The major formal grammatical feature of this subdivision is their open or closed character. The notional parts of speech are open classes of words, with established basic semantic, formal and functional characteristics. There are only four notional classes of words, which correlate with the four main syntactic positions in the sentence: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. They are interconnected by the four stages of the lexical paradigmatic series of derivation, e.g.: to decide – decision – decisive – decisively. The functional words are closed classes of words: they cannot be further enlarged and are given by lists. The closed character of the functional words is determined by their role in the structure of the sentence: the functional words expose various constructional functions of syntactic units, and this makes them closer to grammatical rather than to lexical means of the language.

As for pronouns and the numerals, according to the functional approach they form a separate supra-class of substitutional parts of speech, since they have no function of their own in the sentence, but substitute for notional parts of speech and perform their characteristic functions. The difference between the four notional parts of speech and substitutional parts of speech is also supported by the fact that the latter are closed groups of words like functional parts of speech.

The three supra-classes are further subdivided into classes (the parts of speech proper) and sub-classes (groups inside the parts of speech). For example, nouns are divided into personal and common, animate and inanimate, countable and uncountable, etc.; pronouns are subdivided into personal, possessive (conjoint and absolute), objective pronouns, demonstrative, reflexive, relative, etc.; numerals are subdivided into cardinal and ordinal, etc.

9. The field approach in the classification of parts of speech. The field approach helps clarify many disputable points in the traditional classification of parts of speech. The borderlines between the classes of words are not rigid; instead of borderlines there is a continuum of numerous intermediary phenomena, combining the features of two or more major classes of words. Field theory states that in each class of words there is a core, the bulk of its members that possess all the characteristic features of the class, and a periphery (marginal part), which includes the words of mixed, dubious character, intermediary between this class and other classes. For example, the non-finite forms of the verb (the infinitive, the gerund, participles I and II) make up the periphery of the verbal class: they lack some of the features of a verb, but possess certain features characteristic to either nouns, or adjectives, or adverbs.

There are numerous intermediary phenomena that form a continuum between the notional and functional supra-classes; for example, there are adverbs whose functioning is close to that of conjunctions and prepositions, e.g.: however, nevertheless, besides, etc. Notional words of broad meaning are similar in their functioning to the substitutive functioning of the pronouns, e.g.: He speaks English better than I do; Have you seen my pen? I can’t find the wretched thing. Together with the regular pronouns they form the stages of the paradigmatic series, in which the four notional parts of speech are substitutively represented, cf.: one, it, thing, matter, way… - do, make, act…- such, similar, same… - thus, so, there…

The implementation of the field approach to the distribution of words in parts of speech was formulated by the Russian linguist V. G. Admoni.

Miscellaneous modern authors:

- Thomas Stern Elliot

- Henry James

- William Butler Yeats

- Virginia Woolf

- Edwin Muir

- Joseph Conrad

- James Joyce

- Rudyard Kipling

- Thomas Hardy.

- George Bernard Shaw.

- Somerset Maugham

- Edward Forster

- John Osborne

- Paul Scott

- Percy Howard Newby

- James Gordon Farrell

- Vidiadhar Naipol

- Kazuo Ishiguro

- Hanif Kureishi

- Timothy Mo

- Salman Rushdie "East, West" (1994)

Modernism: symbolism, impressionism, post-impressionism, futurism, constructivism, imagism, expressionism, dada, etc.

Post-modernism (see also R. Barthe " The Death of the Author ")

New English genres:

the theatre of the absurd

autobiographic novel

anti-utopia based in allegory and parable

pastiche

historical novel (history perceived personally

war poetry

detective and mystery story

political drama

thriller

spy novel

fantasy

school story

science fiction, etc.

Edwardian Era (1901-1910).

- George Bernard Shaw "Man and Superman" (1903), "Major Barbara" (1907)

- John Galsworthy "Strife" (1909), "Justice" (1910), " The Forsyte Saga " (1906-1921)(" The Man of Property " (1906))

- Arnold Bennett (1867-1931) "Anna of the Five Towns" (1902), "The Old Wives' Tale" (1908)

- Herbert G. Wells (1866-1946) "The War of the Worlds" (1898), "Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought" (1901), "A Modern Utopia" (1905), "Tono-Bungay" (1909),

- E.M. Forster (1879-1970) " Where Angels Fear to Tread " (1905), " The Longest Journey " (1907), " Howards End " (1910)

- Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) " Jude the Obscure " (1895)

- Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) "If—"

- Henry James (1843-1916) " The Portrait of a Lady " (1881), " The Princess Casamassima " (1886)," The Spoils of Poynton " (1897), " What Maisie Knew " (1897), " The Wings of the Dove " (1902), " The Ambassadors " (1903), " The Golden Bowl " (1904), " The Sacred Fount " (1901).

- Joseph Conrad " Almayer’s Folly " (1895), " Lord Jim " (1900), “ Heart of Darkness ” (1902), " Nostromo " (1904), " The Secret Agent " (1907), " Under Western Eyes " (1911)

- Hilaire Belloc

- G.K. Chesterton

- Edward Thomas

- the Georgians: Rupert Brooke, John Masefield,

- Walter de la Mare

- Robert Graves

- Edmund Blunden

- Siegfried Sassoon

- Isaac Rosenberg

- Wilfred Owen

- Edmund Blunden

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