Typological constants in the morphological system

Typology of morphological systems. Verbal categories

Lecture 4

Katherine Mansfield. The Garden Party

Katherine Mansfield. The Garden Party

And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them …..

Hemingway. The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

“The marvelous thing about it is that it’s painless ”, he said. “ That’s how you know when it starts. ”

“Is it really?”

“Absolutely. I’m awfully sorry about the odor, though. That must bother you.”

“Don’t. Please don’t.”

“Look at them”, he said. “Now is it sight or is it smell that bring them like that?” (…As he looked out past the shade of the tree into the glare of the plain there were three of the big birds squatting obscenely, while in the sky a dozen more sailed.) Today’s the first time they have lit on the ground. I watched the way they sailed very carefully at first in case I ever wanted to use them in a story. That’s funny now”. - “ I wish you wouldn’t ”, she said.

Implication achieved by arrangement of descriptive details:

(A boy of 15 is told that his girl-friend was seen in the woods with another young man. “Were they …were they happy together?” he asks and feels that his heart is broken.)

When he woke up in the night, he heard the wind in the hemlock trees outside the cottage and the waves of the lake coming in on the shore and he went back to sleep.

In the morning there was a big wind blowing, and the waves were running high on the beach, and he was awake a long time before he remembered that his heart was broken.

It was just growing dusky as Laura shut their garden gates. A big dog ran by like a shadow. The road gleamed white, and down below in the hollow the little cottages were in deep shade. How quiet it seemed after the afternoon. Here she was going down the hill to somewhere where a man lay dead, and she couldn't realize it. Why couldn't she? She stopped a minute. And it seemed to her that kisses, voices, tinkling spoons, laughter, the smell of crushed grass were somehow inside her. She had no room for anything else.How strange! She looked up at the pale sky, and all she thought was, " Yes, it was the most successful party. "

1. Topological constants in the morphological system

2. Typology of parts of speech

3. Typology of grammar categories. Verbal categories

4. Noun categories

5. Adjective categories

The grammatical category expresses a generalized grammatical meaning. This general meaning is present in a set of word forms, each of which has its own individual meaning, which is a particular case of the general one.

The general meaning of the category of case is relations of an object to other objects and phenomena. This category is manifested in the forms of noun declension (склонение). Each form of a particular language has its own individual meaning ("possession", "doer of the action", "object of the action", "recipient").

Principles of linguistic comparison is based on:

· Presence/ absence of a certain grammatical category

e.g. There is a morphological category definitencss/indefiniteness in English but the Russian language lacks it. This meaning is expressed in Russian by lexical means.

· Particular meanings expressed by the paradigm

e.g. English and Russian has the singular and the plural forms of the category of number. But in Sanskrit there is also dual (двойственное) number.

· Means o f expressing the meanings

e.g. to English the meaning of singularity is always expressed by a zero-article, to Russian it can also be expressed by suffixes -й (for the masculine gender), -a (for the feminine gender), -o (for the neuter gender) and others.

Types of grammatical categories

• immanent, i.e. male for a given class of words

e.g. The category of number is organically connected with the functional nature of the noun because nouns usually denote objects and objects can be counted.

• reflective, i.e. serving as a sign of correlation with some other class

e.g. The category of number does not characterize the process denoted by the verb. It only reflects the properties of the doer of the action.

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