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Lecture 2. Contrastive typology

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.

 

 

The content of the lecture:

 

Contrastive typology, as a trend in general linguistic typology, is occupied by the problem of comparing the structural forms of languages belonging to the same language type on all levels of typological analysis, depending on the choice of one investigator in particular or all the society in the whole.

 

 

Key words: structural type; synthetic languages; analytical languages; linguistic typology; dominant / common features; isomorphic regularities; allomorphic singularities.

Objectives and tasks of the lecture:

 

After completing your work over the material of a lecture you should be able to discuss:

1. Structural forms as the basis in typological contrasting.

2. Contrastive typology: the aims and methods of investigation..

3. The object of investigation in contrastive typology.

4. The peculiar features of contrasting procedures.

 

 

Methodical recommendations for studying lecture 2:

When working over the material presented below it is advisable to draw a line of demarcation between the languages on the basis of their grammatical structure – synthetic and analytical.

The material for lecture 2:

1. On the earth there exist a great number of languages and each of them possesses some set of individual, specific features which make every other language different of all others. On the other hand, any language possesses a sum of the features common in other languages. These common features may embrace some group of languages but not all of them. It is worth noting that even kindred languages, as, for example, Russian and Bulgarian, may show deep individual differences in their structure. Thus, Russian, with a developed case system belongs to the synthetic languages, while Bulgarian is regarded as analytical language. If to recognize as the basis of classification any feature, e.g. the grammatical category of gender, as a result we shall receive: 1) languages, lacking the category of gender - Turkic, Finno-Ugric, Armenian, Tajik; 2) languages possessing the category of gender – Ukrainian, Russian. Belorussian, Lithuanian, Latvian. Grouping the languages on the basis of this feature makes already the process of distinguishing a typological feature.

To investigate, distinguish and characterize the common features in languages so as to group these languages is the main aim of the section that got a name of ‘linguistic typology’. So, it is justified to interpret the term ‘ linguistic typology’ as the teaching on the types of languages structure and aims at establishing the most general structural types of languages on the basis of their dominant or common phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactic features.

2. In contrastive typology it is relevant to treat dominant or common features as well as divergent features/phenomena, which are found both in languages of the same structural type (synthetic, analytical, agglutinative, etc.) as well as in languages of different structural types (synthetic and analytical, agglutinative and incorporative, etc.). So, the number of languages involved into analysis is not bound and, what is remarkable, the results of investigation are immediately directed upon practical use.

The number of different languages which may be simultaneously subjected to typological contrasting at a time is not limited and is always predetermined by the aim pursued. The latter may be either theoretical or practical and involve the investigation of common or both common and divergent features/phenomena in the corresponding planes/aspects of the contrasted languages. The typological study of such features/ phenomena, which usually represent certain regularities in the structure of different languages may be facilitated (or made more difficult) by the existence or absence of some results hitherto obtained in the languages concerned for some other purpose and by means of other methods of linguistic investigation.

3. In typology of special importance is the notion of ‘isomorphism’. This term goes back to Greek is’ equal’, ‘identical’ and morph –‘type’ kind, form’ and was introduced into linguistic usage by Y.Kurilovitch (1962), Polish linguist, from mathematics where it designates ‘identity, similarity’ of the inner constitution of the two numbers. For illustration we may take the grammatical categories in a structure of English and Ukrainian. In these languages we shall try to trace the actualization of such categories as gender, number and case. In relation to number we may observe the fact of isomorphism, while in relation to gender – allomorphism, i.e. distinction, because the category of gender is not present among purely grammatical means of expression and is rendered through the lexical means. The same is true concerning the category of case when in Ukrainian language cases are rendered explicitly through the system of case inflections while in English the main means for distinguishing case relations are the prepositions and the word order.

If to take German and English nouns the allomorphism here is more distinctly expressed: German noun is characterized with four grammatical categories – gender, number, case and determination, while the English noun – with only two categories – number and determination. Though it would be justified to understand ‘isomorphism as not only the similar features which serve as the typological characteristics of a given class or subclass of a word, but also their material embodiment

Thus by isomorphism within the framework of linguistic typology we shall understand the common, similar features in a structure of contrasting languages and call them as isomorphic regularities, while by allomorphism the distinctive features in a structure of the contrasted languages – allomorphic singularities.

4. Contrastive typological investigations may be focused on various linguistic phenomena ranging from separate signs of the phonetic/ phonological, morphological, lexical or syntactic plane up to several languages. Any of these signs, features/phenomena or separate languages may be contrasted either synchronically or diachronically. But whatever the language features/phenomena or the planes/aspects to which they belong, and irrespective of the number of languages involved, the final aims of major typological investigations are the following:

1) to identify and classify accordingly the main isomorphic and allomorphic features characteristic of languages under investigation;

2) to draw from these common or divergent features respectively the

isomorphic regularities and the allomorphic singularities in the languages contrasted;

3) to establish on the basis of the obtained isomorphic features the

typical language structures and the types of languages;

4) to perform on the basis of the obtained practical data a truly scientific

classification of the existing languages of the world;

5) to establish on this basis the universal features/phenomena, which

pertain to each single language of the world.

 

Contrastive typological investigations are both various and manifold, they may involve a separate language feature or phenomenon pertained to some genealogically close or genealogically far/alien languages, and they may involve several features or phenomena pertained to many genealogically close or genealogically different languages. Besides, the object of contrastive typology may as well be separate features and language units or phenomena pertained to both living and one or more dead languages. Consequently, the object of investigation may involve an extensive language area/material or it may involve a restricted object/ material of investigation.

 

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