The Category of Gender in Russian

The Category of case in English is represented by the opposition of two forms (Common - Possessive), in Russian - 6 forms.

Types of Grammatical Meaning

Grammatical classes of words.

The words of language, depending on various formal and semantic features, are divided into grammatically relevant sets or classes. The traditional grammatical classes of words are called "parts of speech". Since the word is distinguished not only by grammatical, but also by semantico-lexemic properties, some scholars refer to parts of speech as "lexico-grammatical" series of words, or as "lexico-grammatical categories" [Смирницкий]. There are Notional (noun, adjective, numeral, pronoun, verb, ad­verb) and Functional (ar­ticle, preposition, conjunction, particle, modal word, interjection) parts of speech.

1. Implicit and explicit

2. Implicit meanings: general and dependant

3. ReferentialandRelational

The implicit grammatical meaning is not expressed formally:

the word “table” does not contain any hints in its form as to it being inanimate.

The explicit grammatical meaning is always marked morphologically (has its marker).

The general grammatical meaning is the meaning of the whole word-class, of a part of speech.

nouns have the general grammatical meaning of thingness

The dependent grammatical meaning is the meaning of a subclass within the same part of speech which influences the realization of grammatical categories restricting them to a subclass.

countability/uncountability - the category of number

animateness/inanimateness - the category of case,

teminativeness/non-terminativeness - the category of tense,

transitivity/intransitivity – the category of voice.

Referential which reflect objective properties of real phenomena (quantity, time, etc)

Relational (syntactic) which serve to combine words into phrases and sentences

Verbal number and person

Gender and number of Russian adjectives

Smirnitsky's Distinctive Features of a Grammatical Category

1. Any grammatical category must be represented by, at least, two grammatical forms (grammatical forms are limited in number and regular).

2. No grammatical category can be represented by all the word forms of the word. If some grammatical meaning is inherent in all the word forms of the given word, we shall deal here not with a grammatical category but with lexico-grammatical category.

3. One word form can combine different grammatical categories.

the form "speaks" expresses meanings of 5 categories: tense, person, number, mood, voice.

4. No word form can combine 2 categorial meanings (grammatical meanings of the same category).

5. Every word form must represent at least one categorial form or belong to some grammatical category. There are no word forms without grammatical categories.

6. Grammar studies categories of different types, most familiar of which are morphological grammatical categories.

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