Some word classes

Text 1

MORPHOLOGY AND SYNTAX

UNIT II

Choose any of the following topics to write a short essay.

Express your opinion of the content and expression-plane of the text.

Discuss the text in class.

Present a summary of the text

Summarize each paragraph from the text in one or two sentences.

Use the vocabulary practiced in tasks 1 and 2 to make up situations of your own.

Explain the meaning of the following words and word-combinations. Pay special attention to the etymological characteristics of some of them.

Tasks

1. Find the Russian equivalents for the following words and word-combinations:

bit of information; to come full circle; with loving care; different kinds of information; the main entry of the word; device; the most important thing to remember; to come in some order; citations or brief phrases containing the word in question; with confidence and gratitude.

dictionaries of usage; bilingual diction­aries and dictionaries of hard words;

3. Make your own list of key–units and topical vocabulary.

1) Outstanding lexicographers.

2) A reliable source of information about words.

3) Dictionaries in Russia.

4) Modern English dictionaries.

5) Dictionaries of curious words.

6) Slang and professional jargons in Dictionaries.

A word is not simply a noun or adjective; it is a noun or adjective of a particular kind. Thus, most adjectives can be put either before a noun (as an attributive adjective) or after some form of the verb be (as a predicate adjective): the ancient mariner or The mariner was ancient. Some, however, are found in only one of the two positions: the main reason, but not *The reason was main; and on the other hand, The building was afire, but not *the afire building. It is obvious that ancient, main, and afire do not enter into quite the same com­binations. Furthermore, most adjectives can be compared, although some take the endings -er and -est, while others use the words more and most: happy, happier, happiest, but comic, more comic, most comic. Still other adjectives can hardly be compared at all, for instance above in the above statement. *The abover statement is completely impossible, and *The more above statement is peculiar at best.

Some adjectives, such as aware and important, are followed by complements very much as verbs are. We can say aware that he is going like know that he is going and aware of it like know of it. Furthermore, we say important to go or important that we go much like hope to go or hope that we go. Also verblike in their complements are those adjectives that are followed by noun phrases, such as worth a million dollars, which is like costs a million dollars except that worth is an adjective and cost a verb. Not all adjectives take complements like the ones above, but those that do are a special subtype—or rather several subtypes depending on what sort of complement they take.

Still another distinction among adjectives is that different kinds may re­quire a fixed order when they modify the same noun. For example, the modifiers in the phrase all the many beautiful French girls must come in that precise order because no other arrangement is idiomatic English. On the other hand, the modifiers in dour, quarrelsome, stubborn, surly, morose teachers can come in any order at all. Since dour, quarrelsome, stubborn, surly, and morose can all substitute for one another in any order, we know they are the same type of adjective, whereas all, the, many, beautiful, and French are different kinds of modifiers because they cannot replace one another. Indeed, the latter five words have such differences among them that we may hesitate to say they are all adjectives. In a number of cases it is hard to be sure whether we should call a word an adjective or not—for example corner in the corner store, running in the running water, and upstairs in the room upstairs.

The truth of the matter is that the traditional notion of "adjective" is a broad one because it lumps together a good many sorts of words that are in some important ways quite different from one another. A finer, more detailed description of the parts of speech recognizes not just one group of words called adjectives, but a number of partly overlapping categories, like those above.

Much the same thing is true of the other major word classes. For instance, there are several kinds of nouns in English. Countable or unit nouns can be either singular or plural, and when singular they have to be used with a modifier like the or a: He lives in the (or a) tower, not *He lives in tower. Uncountable or mass nouns, on the other hand, are always singular and are used either with a modifier like the or with no modifier at all: He heard the news or He heard news, but not *He heard a news or *He heard newses. Furthermore, unit nouns when plural are used with modifiers like many or fewer, whereas mass nouns take modifiers like much or less: many spots, not *much spots, but much machinery, not *many machinery. Proper nouns are regularly used without any kind of modifier: She works in New York, not *She works in the (or a) New York. Some unit nouns have no singular forms: He put on his trousers, not *his trouser; others, though singular in form, can take plural verbs and pronouns: either The group has gone its own way (collectively) or The group have gone their own ways (individually). It was noted earlier that human nouns take the relative pronoun who, while nonhuman nouns take which. Nouns are also either animate or inanimate; the former are re­quired as the subject of some verbs and as the object of others: The girl likes the dress because it flatters her, not * The dress likes the girl because she flatters it.

There are also many verb classes. Some verbs must have a noun, pronoun, or adjective following them. Thus, it is impossible to say * He frequented or * She seemed; we must follow these two verbs with complements: He frequented dark alleys and She seemed apprehensive. Other verbs never take a complement: The sore festered, not *The sore festered his arm. Verbs like frequented, which require a noun or pronoun after them, are transitive verbs; those like seemed, which can be followed by adjectives or in some cases by nouns, are called linking verbs; and those like festered, which have no complement, are intran­sitive. Some verbs belong to more than one class. Thus, we can say either He finished his work or just He finished and, with a slight change of meaning in the verb, either She was flying or She was flying a plane.

Adverbs have variety also. If we try to put adverbs into a sentence like He plays the sitar, we will discover that some, like beautifully, fit naturally only at the end of the sentence. Other arrangements, such as Beautifully he plays the sitar, are possible, but they seem "poetic" or somehow unusual. Other adverbs, like often, can go either at the end or between the subject and the verb (He plays the sitar often or He often plays the sitar) without seeming unusual in either position. Still others, like never, must come between subject and verb (He never plays the sitar) if the sentence is to be idiomatic. And finally, some adverbs, like consequently, can be found in any of three positions: Consequently, he plays the sitar; He, consequently, plays the sitar; and He plays the sitar, consequently. On the basis of the positions in which they occur naturally, we can set up at least four subclasses of adverbs (called after their characteristic meanings or functions adverbs of manner, adverbs of frequency, negative adverbs, and sentence adverbs), but as you might guess there are more than just four such subclasses. There are also adverbs of time, like now, and adverbs of place, like here. When adverbs of manner, place, and time occur together at the end of a sentence, they usually come in that order: He plays beautifully here now.

Nouns, verbs, and adverbs are like adjectives in that it is easily possible to divide them into smaller word classes. It may also be difficult to know which of these traditional parts of speech a word belongs to. Is good an adjective or a noun in The good is desirable for its own sake? Is still an adverb or an adjective in He stood still? Is up a verb or something else in He up and clobbered the other guy? These questions have no obvious answers. At least grammarians have not been able to agree on them.

From what has been said thus far, it should be clear that there is not and cannot be a fixed number of parts of speech, because the four major classes can all be subdivided into smaller groups. How many word classes we recog­nize depends partly on how detailed we want our grammatical description to be. A part of speech ought to include all words that are alike in their use, but we can set up many or few such classes, depending on how much alike we want the members to be. A grammatical description can include a large amount of information, like a detailed blueprint of a building that shows every particular the user might need to be aware of. Or it can merely approximate the gross features, like a rough sketch that ignores fine points and exact dimensions.

There is no way to say in the abstract which is the better description of a house—a complete set of blueprints or a pencil and watercolor sketch. Which is better depends on what the description is to be used for. If you want to construct the house, you had better use the blueprints; but if you want to give someone a general impression of what the building will look like when it is finished, the sketch may be better. Grammatical description is much like that. For some purposes we need highly precise, detailed, and complete grammars. For other purposes we need grammars that are more superficial and general.

If a linguist is trying to write a description of English that can be fed into a computer for use in translating Russian, he will want an extremely specific one. The machine will need to be told how to handle every detail of the language if a reliable and readable translation is to be produced. In teaching English to foreigners, on the other hand, we can make do with a much less detailed grammar.

All human beings have an intelligence that permits them to learn things they have not been explicitly taught; consequently, they need to be instructed in less detail than does a computer, which for all its accom­plishments is no more than an incredibly speedy moron. A linguistic descrip­tion for native speakers can be even less detailed than one intended for foreigners, since the native speaker already knows English. We study the grammar of our own tongue not to learn the language, but to learn something about language. Two quite different sorts of knowledge are involved.

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