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