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М. Я. Блох ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКАЯ ГРАММАТИКА АНГЛИЙСКОГО ЯЗЫКА Д   опущено Министерством просвещения СССРв качестве учебника для студентов педагогических институтов по специальности  Москва «Высшая школа» 1983 № 2103 «Иностранные языки» Сканирование, распознавание, проверка: Корректор, сентябрь 2004 г. Для некоммерческого использования. Исправлено десять опечаток. Орфография из амер. переведена в брит. Рецензенты: кафедра английского языка Горьковского педагогического института иностранных языков им. Н. А. Добролюбова и доктор филол. наук, проф. Л. Л. Нелюбин. Блох М. Я. Б70 Теоретическая грамматика английского языка: Учебник. Для студентов филол. фак. ун-тов и фак. англ. яз. педвузов. — М.: Высш. школа, 1983.— с. 383 В пер.: 1 р. В учебнике рассматриваются важнейшие проблемы морфологии и синтаксиса английского языка в свете ведущих принципов современного системного языкознания. Введение в теоретические проблемы грамматики осуществляется на фоне обобщающего описания основ грамматического строя английского языка. Особое внимание уделяется специальным методам научного анализа грамматических явлений и демонстрации исследовательских приемов на конкретном текстовом материале с целью развития у студентов профессионального лингвистического мышления. Учебник написан на английском языке. ББК 81.2 Англ-9  4И (Англ)© Издательство «Высшая школа», 1983. CONTENTS Page Preface 4 Chapter I. Grammar in the Systemic Conception of Language. . 6 Chapter II. Morphemic Structure of the Word 17 Chapter III. Categorial Structure of the Word 26 Chapter IV. Grammatical Classes of Words 37 Chapter V. Noun: General 49 Chapter VI. Noun: Gender 53 Chapter VII. Noun: Number 57 Chapter VIII. Noun: Case 62 Chapter IX. Noun: Article Determination 74 Chapter X. Verb: General 85 Chapter XI. Non-Finite Verbs (Verbids) 102 Chapter XII. Finite Verb: Introduction 123 Chapter XIII. Verb: Person and Number 125 Chapter XIV. Verb; Tense 137 Chapter XV. Verb: Aspect 155 Chapter XVI. Verb: Voice 176 Chapter XVII. Verb: Mood 185 Chapter XVIII. Adjective 203 Chapter XIX. Adverb ... 220 Chapter XX. Syntagmatic Connections of Words 229 Chapter XXI. Sentence: General . . . 236 Chapter XXII. Actual Division of the Sentence 243 Chapter XXIII. Communicative Types of Sentences 251 Chapter XXIV. Simple Sentence: Constituent Structure ... 268 Chapter XXV. Simple Sentence: Paradigmatic Structure . . . 278 Chapter XXVI. Composite Sentence as a Polypredicative Construction 288 Chapter XXVII. Complex Sentence 303 Chapter XXVIII. Compound Sentence 332 Chapter XXIX. Semi-Complex Sentence 340 Chapter XXX. Semi-Compound Sentence ....... 351 Chapter XXXI. Sentence in the Text 361 A List of Selected Bibliography 374 Subject Index 376 PREFACE This book, containing a theoretical outline of English grammar, is intended as a manual for the departments of English in Universities and Teachers' Colleges. Its purpose is to present an introduction to the problems of up-to-date grammatical study of English on a systemic basis, sustained by demonstrations of applying modern analytical techniques to various grammatical phenomena of living English speech. The suggested description of the grammatical structure of English, reflecting the author's experience as a lecturer on theoretical English grammar for students specialising as teachers of English, naturally, cannot be regarded as exhaustive in any point of detail. While making no attempt whatsoever to depict the grammar of English in terms of the minutiae of its arrangement and functioning (the practical mastery of the elements of English grammar is supposed to have been gained by the student at the earlier stages of tuition), we rather deem it as our immediate aims to supply the student with such information as will enable him to form judgments of his own on questions of diverse grammatical intricacies; to bring forth in the student a steady habit of trying to see into the deeper implications underlying the outward appearances of lingual correlations bearing on grammar; to teach him to independently improve his linguistic qualifications through reading and critically appraising the available works on grammatical language study, including the current materials in linguistic journals; to foster his competence in facing academic controversies concerning problems of grammar, which, unfortunately but inevitably, are liable to be aggravated by polemical excesses and terminological discrepancies. In other words, we wish above all to provide for the condition that, on finishing his study of the subject matter of the book, under the corresponding guidance of his College tutor, the student should progress in developing a grammatically-oriented mode of understanding facts of language, viz. in mastering that which, in the long run, should distinguish a professional linguist from a layman. The emphasis laid on cultivating an active element in the student's approach to language and its grammar explains why the book gives prominence both to the technicalities of grammatical observations and to the general methodology of linguistic knowledge: the due application of the latter will lend the necessary demonstrative force to any serious consideration of the many special points of grammatical analysis. In this connection, throughout the whole of the book we have tried to point out the progressive character of the development of modern grammatical theory, and to show that in the course of disputes and continued research in manifold particular fields, the grammatical domain of linguistic science arrives at an ever more adequate presentation of the structure of language in its integral description. We firmly believe that this kind of outlining the foundations of the discipline in question is especially important at the present stage of the developing linguistic knowledge — the knowledge which, far from having been by-passed by the general twentieth century advance of science, has found itself in the midst of it. Suffice it to cite such new ideas and principles introduced in the grammatical theory of our times, and reflected in the suggested presentation, as the grammatical aspects of the correlation between language and speech; the interpretation of grammatical categories on the strictly oppositional basis; the demonstration of grammatical semantics with the help of structural modelling; the functional-perspective patterning of utterances; the rise of the paradigmatic approach to syntax; the expansion of syntactic analysis beyond the limits of a separate sentence into the broad sphere of the continual text; and, finally, the systemic principle of description applied to the interpretation of language in general and its grammatical structure in particular. It is by actively mastering the essentials of these developments that the student will be enabled to cope with the grammatical aspects of his future linguistic work as a graduate teacher of English. Materials illustrating the analysed elements of English grammar have been mostly collected from the literary works of British and American authors. Some of the offered examples have been subjected to slight alterations aimed at giving the necessary prominence to the lingual phenomena under study. Source references for limited stretches of text are not supplied except in cases of special relevance (such as implications of individual style or involvement of contextual background). The author pays tribute to his friends and colleagues — teachers of the Lenin State Pedagogical Institute (Moscow) for encouragement and help they extended to him during the years of his work on the presented matters. The author's sincere thanks are due to the staff of the English Department of the Dobrolyubov State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages (Gorky) and to Prof. L. L. Nelyubin for the trouble they took in reviewing the manuscript. Their valuable advice and criticisms were carefully taken into consideration for the final preparation of the text. M. Blokh CHAPTER I GRAMMAR IN THE SYSTEMIC CONCEPTION OF LANGUAGE § 1. Language is a means of forming and storing ideas as reflections of reality and exchanging them in the process of human intercourse. Language is social by nature; it is inseparably connected with the people who are its creators and users; it grows and develops together with the development of society.* Language incorporates the three constituent parts ("sides"), each being inherent in it by virtue of its social nature. These parts are the phonological system, the lexical system, the grammatical system. Only the unity of these three elements forms a language; without any one of them there is no human language in the above sense. The phonological system is the subfoundation of language; it determines the material (phonetical) appearance of its significative units. The lexical system is the whole set of naming means of language, that is, words and stable word-groups. The grammatical system is the whole set of regularities determining the combination of naming means in the formation of utterances as the embodiment of thinking process. Each of the three constituent parts of language is studied by a particular linguistic discipline. These disciplines, presenting a series of approaches to their particular objects of analysis, give the corresponding "descriptions" of language consisting in ordered expositions of the constituent parts in question. Thus, the phonological description of language is effected by the science of phonology; the lexical description of language is effected by the science of lexicology; the *  See: Общее языкознание. Формы существования, функции, история языка/Отв. ред. Серебренников Б. А. — М., 1970, с. 9 и cл.grammatical description of language is effected by the science of grammar. Any linguistic description may have a practical or theoretical purpose. A practical description is aimed at providing the student with a manual of practical mastery of the corresponding part of language (within the limits determined by various factors of educational destination and scientific possibilities). Since the practice of lingual intercourse, however, can only be realised by employing language as a unity of all its constituent parts, practical linguistic manuals more often than not comprise the three types of description presented in a complex. As for theoretical linguistic descriptions, they pursue analytical aims and therefore present the studied parts of language in relative isolation, so as to gain insights into their inner structure and expose the intrinsic mechanisms of their functioning. Hence, the aim of theoretical grammar of a language is to present a theoretical description of its grammatical system, i.e. to scientifically analyse and define its grammatical categories and study the mechanisms of grammatical formation of utterances out of words in the process of speech making. § 2. In earlier periods of the development of linguistic knowledge, grammatical scholars believed that the only purpose of grammar was to give strict rules of writing and speaking correctly. The rigid regulations for the correct ways of expression, for want of the profound understanding of the social nature of language, were often based on purely subjective and arbitrary judgements of individual grammar compilers. The result of this "prescriptive" approach was, that alongside of quite essential and useful information, non-existent "rules" were formulated that stood in sheer contradiction with the existing language usage, i.e. lingual reality. Traces of this arbitrary prescriptive approach to the grammatical teaching may easily be found even in to-date's school practice. To refer to some of the numerous examples of this kind, let us consider the well-known rule of the English article stating that the noun which denotes an object "already known" by the listener should be used with the definite article. Observe, however, English sentences taken from me works of distinguished authors directly contradicting "I've just read a book of yours about Spain and I wanted to ask you about it." — "It's not a very good book, I'm afraid" (S. Maugham). I feel a good deal of hesitation about telling you this story of my own. You see it is not a story like other stories I have been telling you: it is a true story (J. K. Jerome). Or let us take the rule forbidding the use of the continuous tense-forms with the verb be as a link, as well as with verbs of perceptions. Here are examples to the contrary: My holiday at Crome isn't being a disappointment (A. Huxley). For the first time, Bobby felt, he was really seeing the man (A. Christie). The given examples of English articles and tenses, though not agreeing with the above "prescriptions", contain no grammar mistakes in them. The said traditional view of the purpose of grammar has lately been re-stated by some modern trends in linguistics. In particular, scholars belonging to these trends pay much attention to artificially constructing and analysing incorrect utterances with the aim of a better formulation of the rules for" the construction of correct ones. But their examples and deductions, too, are often at variance with real facts of lingual usage. Worthy of note are the following two artificial utterances suggested as far back as 1956: Colourless green ideas sleep furiously. Furiously sleep ideas green colourless. According to the idea of their creator, the American scholar N. Chomsky, the first of the utterances, although nonsensical logically, was to be classed as grammatically correct, while the second one, consisting of the same words placed in the reverse order, had to be analysed as a disconnected, "ungrammatical" enumeration, a "non-sentence". Thus, the examples, by way of contrast, were intensely demonstrative (so believed the scholar) of the fact that grammar as a whole amounted to a set of non-semantic rules of sentence formation. However, a couple of years later this assessment of the lingual value of the given utterances was disputed in an experimental investigation with informants — natural speakers of English, who could not come to a unanimous conclusion about the correctness or incorrectness of both of them. In particular, some of the informants classed the second utterance as "sounding like poetry". To understand the contradictions between the bluntly formulated "rules" and reality, as well as to evaluate properly the results of informant tests like the one mentioned above, we must bear in mind that the true grammatical rules or regularities cannot be separated from the expression of meanings; on the contrary, they are themselves meaningful. Namely, they are connected with the most general and abstract parts of content inherent in the elements of language. These parts of content, together with the formal means through which they are expressed, are treated by grammarians in terms of "grammatical categories". Such are, for instance, the categories of number or mood in morphology, the categories of communicative purpose or emphasis in syntax, etc. Since the grammatical forms and regularities are meaningful, it becomes clear that the rules of grammar must be stated semantically, or, more specifically, they must be worded functionally. For example, it would be fallacious to state without any further comment that the inverted word order in the English declarative sentence is grammatically incorrect. Word order as an element of grammatical form is laden with its own meaningful functions. It can express, in particular, the difference between the central idea of the utterance and the marginal idea, between emotive and unemotive modes of speech, between different types of style. Thus, if the inverted word order in a given sentence does express these functions, then its use should be considered as quite correct. E.g.: In the centre of the room, under the chandelier, as became a host, stood the head of (he family, old Jolyon himself (J. Galsworthy). The word arrangement in the utterance expresses a narrative description, with the central informative element placed in the strongest semantic position in narration, i.e. at the end. Compare the same sort of arrangement accompanying a plainer presentation of subject matter: Inside on a wooden bunk lay a young Indian woman (E. Hemingway). Compare, further, the following: And ever did his Soul tempt him with evil, and whisper of terrible things. Yet did it not prevail against him, so great was the power of his love (O. Wilde). (Here the inverted word order is employed to render intense emphasis in a legend-stylised narration.) One thing and one thing only could she do for him (R. Kipling). (Inversion in this case is used to express emotional intensification of the central idea.) Examples of this and similar kinds will be found in plenty in Modern English literary texts of good style repute. |