Grammatical meaning

For ex.: speak – speaks +.

2) Equipollent. Both members of the opposition are marked:

For ex.: am ⁺ –is ⁺

3) Gradual. Members of the opposition differ by the degree of certain property:

For ex.: good – better – best.

Most grammatical oppositions are privative.

Grammatical forms express meanings of different categories.

For ex.: the form goes denotes present tense, 3d person, singular number indicative mood, active voice, etc.

Grammatical forms cannot express different meanings of the same category. If a grammatical form has two or more meanings, they belong to different categories.

Grammatical categories reflect phenomena of objective reality. The category of number in nouns reflects the essential properties of noun-referents. Such categories are called notional, or referential categories. Other categories reflect peculiarities of the grammatical structure of the language (numbers in verbs). Such categories may be called formal, or relational. Besides grammatical, or inflectional categories, based on the oppositions of forms, there are categories, based on the oppositions of classes of words. Such categories are called lexico-grammaical, or selective:

For ex.: стол (муж. род) – доска (жен. род) – окно (сред. род)

The word combines in its semantic structure two meanings – lexical and grammatical. Lexical meaning is the individual meaning of the word (e.g. table).

The grammatical meaning is a general, abstract meaning which embraces classes of words. It depends on the lexical meaning and is connected with objective reality indirectly, through the lexical meaning. The grammatical meaning is relative, it is revealed in relations of word forms:

For ex. Speak – speaks.

The grammatical meaning is obligatory. It must be expressed if the speaker wants to be understood. The grammatical meaning must have a grammatical form of expression (inflexions, analytical forms, word-order, etc).

For ex.: walks – is writing

Both forms denote process, but only the second form expresses it grammatically.

Each part of speech has a specific set of grammatical meanings. The English noun, for example, has the grammatical meanings of number and case, the adjective – the grammatical meanings of degrees of comparison. There are some classes of words that are devoid of any lexical meaning and possess the grammatical meaning only. This can be explained by the fact that they have no referents in the objective reality. All function words belong to this group – articles, particles, prepositions, etc.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11