THEORETICAL GRAMMAR EXAMINATION PROBLEMS

1. The subject of theoretical grammar. Its relation to practical grammar.
2. General principles of grammatical analysis: semantic, syntactic and pragmatic.
3. The grammatical structure of the English language: general characteristics. Analytic and synthetic forms of English words.
4. Language as a system and structure. Language levels. Linguistic units and their peculiarities.
5. The dichotomy of language and speech. Language units and speech units.
6. Systemic relations in language: paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations.
7. The morpheme as an elementary meaningful unit. Classification of morphemes.
8. The word as the central unit of language.
9. Lexical and grammatical aspects of the word. Types of grammatical meanings.
10. Grammatical (morphological) categories. Referential and significational grammatical categories.
11. The notion of opposition as the basis of grammatical categories. Types of oppositions. Neutralization of the opposition.
12. The parts of speech problem. Different approaches to classifying parts of speech.
13. Complex approach to the parts of speech classification. Notional and functional parts of speech.
14. The problem of function words in Modern English. Function words in communication.
15. The noun as a part of speech. Morphological, semantic and syntactic properties of the noun. Grammatically relevant classes of nouns.
16. The category of number. Formal and functional features of the number category. The problem of number in different subclasses of nouns.
17. The category of case. Meanings the formant “s” can render. Number of cases in English: different views.
18. The problem of gender in English. Personal pronouns as gender indicators of nouns. Sex distinctions in the system of the noun.
19. The article as a part of speech. Communicative functions of articles.
20. The verb as a part of speech. Classifications of English verbs.
21. General survey of the grammatical categories of the verb.
22. The category of tense in English. Tense oppositions. The problem of future tenses.
23. The category of aspect. Aspect opposition. Progressive and non-progressive verbs in communication.
24. The category of voice. Voice opposition. Different views on the number of voices in English.
25. The category of mood. The problem of mood opposition. Mood and modality.
26. General characteristics of syntax as part of grammar. Syntactic theories.
27. General principles of Transformational-Generative Grammar.
28. General survey of modern approaches to the language study: Textlinguistics, Speech Act Theory, Discourse Analysis.
29. Basic syntactic notions: syntactic units, syntactic relations, syntactic connections.
30. Coordinate syntactic units.
31. Subordinate syntactic units.
32. General characteristics of the word-group. Classifications of word-groups.
33. Nominal word combinations. Noun-phrases with pre-posed and post-posed adjuncts.
34. Verbal word combinations. Types of verbal complements.
35. Primary and secondary predication. Predicative word combinations.
36. The sentence. Structural and semantic characteristics of the sentence. Different approaches to the study of the sentence.
37. The hierarchical structure of the sentence. Immediate Constituents analysis.
38. The paradigm of a simple sentence. Kernel and derived sentences. Syntactic processes.
39. The utterance as a unit of speech. Communicative types of utterances.
40. The utterance. Informative structure of the utterance (FSP). The theme and the rheme.
41. The complex sentence as a polypredicative construction. Types of subordinate clauses.
42. Text as a syntactic unit. Coherence, cohesion and deixis as textual integrative properties.
43. Textual connecting devices. Reiteration, collocation, endophoric relations.
44. The notion of deixis. Textual deictic markers.
45. Pragmatic approach to the study of language units. Speech Act Theory: basic principles and notions.
46. Classifications of speech acts. Indirect speech acts.
47. Basic principles of Discourse Analysis.
48. Maxims of conversation by P. Grice.
49. Implicatures of discourse. Conversational and conventional implicatures.
50. Implicatures and indirectness. The Politeness Principle.