The Adjective. Syntactical characteristics

Lecture # 2 Semantic and grammatical characteristics of the adjective.

SRS-class.

1. The noun: the category of number.

2. The adjective: classes and grammatical categories.

Classical (Ancient Greek) or traditional grammar distinguishes the following morphological classes of words: the noun, the adjective, the pronoun, the numeral, (the stative), the verb, the adverb, the article, the preposition, the conjunction, the particle, the modal word, the interjection. These sets of words are grouped on the morphological (grammatical in the narrow sense) or structural and semantic ground. Cf., the noun denotes a thing of the real (out – linguistic) world (this is the grammatical meaning of the noun); the verb denotes a process etc. (this is the grammatical meaning of the verb). However, the number of parts of speech is not easy to be defined. There is another ground on which the parts of speech are analyzed, i.e. the functional one regarding their syntactic role. The principles of syntactic approach to the classification of the English word stock were worked out by L. Bloomfield, Z. Harris, Ch. Fries.

Notional parts of speech: they have lexical meaning according to which they take on syntactic positions. Functional (auxiliary) parts of speech determine relations between notional parts, word groups and sentences. They specify grammatical meanings of notional parts (a book – the book, a friend of mine – the friend you saw). The number and distribution of parts of speech are still under discussion. Some linguists do not include statives and modal words into parts of speech. Some of them do not number articles and post – positives among the auxiliary.

The syntactico-distributional classification of words is based on their combinability by means of substitution testing. The tests by L. Bloomfield, Z. Harris, Ch. Fries resulted in stating four main syntactic positions of notional words in the English language. The words which have their notional positions are as follows: the noun, the verb, the adjective, the adverb. Pronouns are included into this set as the substitutes of the notional words. The words outside the positions in the sentence are treated as function words of various syntactic meanings.

Adjective is a notional part of speech denoting a permanent or temporary characteristic (quality, attribute, or a trait) of a referent. So, the adjective is related to the referent whose characteristic is (being) described.

Adjectives are distinguished by a specific combinability

with nouns which they modify, usually in preposition and, occasionally, in post-position; they are quality (red book, good book), possessive (my book, his book), demonstrative (this book, those books) ones,

with link-verbs (functional “He is smart” and notional “He seems smart”);

with modifying adverbs “very good”.

Syntactic functions: in the sentence the adjective has the functions of an attribute (An old man was coming towards him) and a predicative (She felt happy).

Identify each italicized word in these sentences as parts of speech:

1. Tony made fudge with walnuts and marshmallows.

2. Eithe r Della or Andrea could play the part well.

3. After the game we congratulated the team.

4. Deena applied glaze to her pottery mug.

5. Wow! I have never seen such passing!

6. The government accused spices of stealing national secrets.

7. Encouraged by her coach, Anne decided to try out for the Olympic team.

8. The frightened dog ran too fast for me to catch it.

9. Both Cindy and Mindy were elected to the committee.

10. Helicopters are sometimes used for aerial photography.

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