Linguistica inglese 2

INTERJECTION

(word classes is a FORMAL …)

To decide what class a word belongs to, it is useful to apply tests of 3 kinds:

Morpological: what forms does a word have (in terms of stems and affixes)

Syntactic: what syntactic roles does a word play?

Semantic: what type of meaning does a word convey?

NOUN AND DETERMINER – PRONOUN

Nouns are defined as words that denote people, animals, things or places.

We can have common noun, proper noun, countable or uncountable

noun, numerals noun.

SYNTACTIC CHARACTERISTICS: (what syntactic roles does a word plays in

phrases or sentences/clauses?) :

noun can occur as the HEAD of a NOUN PHRASE.

Noun can also be preceded by adjectives. These are words that in some way

qualify nouns they precede.

SUBCLASSES OF NOUNS:

- COMMON NOUN

- Countable, uncountable)

- PROPER NOUNS

- NUMERALS

- CARDINALS

- ORDINALS

- PRONOUNS

Common nouns are ordinary, everyday nouns. Some of these can be counted

but others as a rule cannot, and this explains the subdivision in ‘countable’ and

‘uncountable’

Proper nouns are names of people, places and objects. In English these don’t

normally take a preceding determiner or modifying element (the jack, a Sarah

NO) nor a plural ending.

Pronouns are special, in fact some grammarians have argued that they ought

to be put into a class of their own. Considering the world PRONOUN in 2 part :

PRO and NOUN. The word PRO is the latin form of ‘for’ , so what pronouns

means if ‘for a noun’, or ‘intstead of a noun’.

personal pronoun; reflexive pronoun, possessive pronoun, demonstrative

pronoun

interrogative pronoun, indefinite pronoun

A noun can be preceded by a DETERMINERS, that is a class of word that

specify more precisely the meaning of the noun they precede. They can be:

the) a/an)

definite article ( ; indefinite article ( , demonstrative

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(these, that) (…)

determiners , possessive determiners i(my) , quantifiers

(whose, which) (two)

, wh-words and numerals

ADJECTIVES

Adjectives modify nouns. They can sometimes be identified through formal

characteristics: can have affixes. Most adjective are gradable, they can be

preceded by words such as ‘very’ ‘less’ ‘extremely’ which indicate the extent to

which the adjective applies to the word it combine with.

They can also take comparative and superlative endings. This indicated the

greater extent to which the normal form of the adjective, called the absolute

form, applies, while the superlative form indicated the maximal extent.

grater- grater- greatest …

good – better- best

Not all gradable adjectives are able to form comparative and superlative forms

with er and est, some form comparatives and superlatives analytically.

That means that there is no single word form for the comparative and

superlative. The general rule is that adjectives with 3 or mor e syllables take

analytical comparatives and superlative forms.

DISTRIBUTIONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF ADJECTIVES : adjectives typically

occupy two positions in English : attributive position and predicative

position.

When an adjective precedes a noun in a NP, it is said that occur in attributive

position (it supplies more information about the character, nature or state of

the noun). (vedi esempi)

When an adjective follows a linking verb or copula it is said to occur in

predicative position (there is only a small set of linking verb in English) :

the main reason = ATTRIBUTIVE

she is CRAZY

the music sounds GREAT

we say that these are in predicative position because they are used to say

something about the referent or another constituent.

SYNTACTIC CHARACTERISTIC OF ADJECTIVE: THEY CAN OCCUR AS THE

HEAD OF AN ADJECTIVE PHRASE, AND ARE MOST COMMONLY USED AS

MODIFIERS PRECEDING THE HEAD OF A NOUN PHRASE, OR AS

PREDICATIVES FOLLOWING THE VERB IN CCLAUSES.

VERBS

Verbs have endings, which are called INFLECTION, THAT IS a change in the form

of a word that shows its grammatical function

encode

They grammatical properties : any word taking tense inflection IS a

verb.

the -s ending signals that the verb is in the present tense and we call it a

present tense inflection; while the -ed ending encodes a past tense, and is

called past tense inflection. 6

Inflections indicate more than tense, the -s ending on the verb is referred to the

3 person singular of the present tense.

rd

The form of the verb other than the 3 person singular is often referred t as the

rd

base form.

A verb that carries tense is called a FINITE VERB, a verb that doesn’t carry

tense is a NON FINITE VERB (INFINITIVE, PARTICIPLE, . A finite verb is a 'working'

verb with a subject; it can be any tense. A non-finite verb which is also called in infinitive verb has no

subject and can't be in all the tenses.

MAIN VERBS are verbs that can stand on their own in a sentence, without

another verb preceding or following, and they specify a meaning relation

among clause elements.

Verbs that cannot stand on their own but instead function as helping verbs are

called AUXILIARY VERBS or AUXILIARIES.

We can make a subdivision of the class of auxiliaries into 4 groups :

1)MODAL AUXILIARIES : are[will/would; can/could, may/might, must,

shall/should, ought to ] they express modality such as ability, permission,

possibility, obligation, necessity, intention or predictions. They ‘colour’ the

meaning of the verbs they precede.

Modals are always finite, they carry tense, and they don’t take typical verb

endings. Most of them have past tense form.

2)ASPECTUAL AUXILIARIES : (be, have) encode aspect, that is rather

concerned with the internal constituency of the one situation it refers to.

Aspect is a concept which refers to the way the meaning of the main verb is

viewed in time. tense

Aspect is different from TENSE : is the grammatical encoding of the

semantic notion of time. Tense is a deictic category, since it locates

situations in time with reference to the present moment of the time of other

situations.

Aspect is rather concerned with the internal constituency of the situation it

refers to. It can be PERFECTIVE OR IMPERFECTIVE :

BE imperfective aspect (or progressive aspect)



He's dancing.

It is an imperfective aspect because it is presented an ongoing process.

HAVE PERFECTIVE ASPECT



He has broken a wine glass.

Perfective aspect because the auxiliary encodes that the breaking took place in

the past and has current relevance.

If we say:

He broke a wine glass : the past tense is used simply to record the fact

when he broke the wine glass, whereas the perfective form is used to

indicated that he broke a wine glass recently, and that this event is still

relevant.

3)PASSIVE AUXILIARIES : if we turn an active sentence into a passive one

we have to introduce an auxiliary verb, the passive auxiliary verb is BE.

Passive transformation implies a subject-object change.

This is always followed by a main verb ending in -ED which we will name the

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past participle form of the verb.

I drink water water is drank by me



If we want to form the negative form of sentences containing modal auxiliary,

aspectual auxiliary or passive auxiliary we simply add the negative particle not

after the first auxiliary; ‘not’ can’t be separate from the auxiliary.

4)DUMMY AUXILIARIES

If we want to form a negative form of a sentence that doesn’t contain an

auxiliary verb, we cannot simply add ‘not’ but we need to insert a form of the

verb DO.

The process of inserting do is called do-support.

Do support is not necessary if the sentence in question contains an auxiliary

verb.

Do is also used to form the interrogative versions of sentences that don’t

contain an auxiliary verb. We insert do before the main verb and then we invert

this verb with the subject. The inversion process is called subject- auxiliary

inversion.

Do you need coffee?

Do has constantly been referred to as a dummy element because it doesn’t

really by itself carry any meaning but is inserted to aid main verbs in forming

negative or interrogative sentences, and also to allow code and emphasis.

What distinguishes auxiliaries from main verb is that they can :

1) carry the negative enclitic particle NOT

2) invert with the subject

3) manifest CODE : cause they can be stranded, that means to say that they can stand on their own

for istance:

I can dance but my sister can’t.

4) carry emphatic stress : I do like cheese

These are the NICE properties. Nice is an acronym (èkrnm), stands for

NEGATION, INVERTION, CODE EMPHASIS.

Auxiliaries can be combined : the company has been being taxed 3 time

this years./ you should have called the doctor

It is always the first auxiliary that carries tense, and is finite. All the other

verbs are non finite.

Verb forms can be grouped into three major classes according to their ability to

function as main verbs or auxiliary verbs:

LEXICAL VERBS: function only as main verbs (ex: run, eat, think)

PRIMARY VERBS: can function as both auxiliary and main verbs (be, have,

do)

MODAL VERBS : function only as auxiliary verbs.

Multi-word lexical verbs

•There are three major types of multi-word verb: •phrasal verbs : VERB + ADVERB

PARTICLE (VERB + PREPOSIT) (eg. look after) )•phrasal-prepositional verbs (eg. get

down on) (VERB+PARTICLE+PREPOSITION)

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SINGLE WORD LEXICAL VERBS can be grouped into seven major semantic

categories:

1) activity verbs: an action performed by an agent (ex: work)

2) mental verbs: report states of perception, desire (ex: think, want, wonder)

3) causative verbs: used to indicate that one person causes another person to do something

(ex: allow, cause)

for the first person

4) verbs of occurrence: report events that take place without an actor (ex:

die, develop, grew)

5) verbs of existence: reporting a state of existence (stay) or a relationship

between entities (include, impu)

7) verbs of aspect: describing the stage of progress of an activity (start, stop,

continue)

VALENCY PATTERN

The main verb determines the other elements that are necessary for the clause

The pattern of the clause elements is called valency pattern.

The valency patterns are differentiated according to the clause elements

(DO, IO, SP).

that follow the verb.

There are 5 major valency patterns: - Intransitive- Monotransitive- Ditransitive - Complex

transitive – Copular

Intransitive: An intransitive verb expresses an action but is not followed by an object

Pattern: S+V“My parents arrived”

Monotransitives = occur with a single direct object Pattern: S+V+DO“She forgot her

keys”

Ditransitive Pattern: S+V+IO+DO ; Ditransitives occur with two object phra