Теоретическая грамматика английского языка 2 (стр. 1 из 54)
Марк Яковлевич Блох
Марк Яковлевич Блох — известный ученый-лингвист, доктор филологических наук, профессор. Заведует кафедрой грамматики и истории английского языка Московского государственного педагогического университета. Ведет исследовательскую работу в области теории английского языка, общего, типологического и германского языкознания, теории перевода, лингводидактики. В рамках выдвинутых проф. М.Я.Блохом научных направлений успешно работают его многочисленные ученики-кандидаты и доктора филологических наук.
М.Я.Блох
Теоретическая грамматика
английского языка
Издание третье, исправленное
Рекомендовано
Министерством образования
Российской Федерации
вкачестве учебника
для студентов институтов и факультетов иностранных языков
Москва «Высшая школа»
2000
УДК 802.0
ББК 81.2 Англ
Б 70
Рецензент:
кафедра грамматики и истории английского языка Московского государственного лингвистического университета (зав. кафедрой проф.Т.С. Сорокина)
ISBN 5-06-003669-3 © ГУП издательство «Высшая школа», 2000
Оригинал-макет данного издания является собственностью издательства «Высшая школа» и его репродуцирование (воспроизведение) любым способом без согласия издательства запрещается.
The present theoretical outline of English grammar, 3rd edition, is intended as a manual for the departments of English in universities and teacher training colleges. Its purpose is to introduce the students into 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 given description of the grammatical structure of English, naturally, is not to be regarded as exhaustive in any point of detail. The author's immediate aims were to supply the students with such information as will enable them to form judgements of their own on questions of diverse grammatical intricacies (the practical mastery of the elements of English grammar is supposed to have been gained by the students at the earlier stages of tuition); to bring forth in the students a steady habit of trying to see into the deeper implications underlying the outward appearances of lingual correlations bearing on grammar; to teach them to independently improve their linguistic qualifications through reading and critically appraising the available works on grammatical language study; to foster their competence in facing academic controversies concerning problems of grammar.
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, the author has tried, throughout the whole of the book, to point out the progressive character of the development of modern grammatical theory. Indeed, one is to clearly understand that in the course of disputes and continued research in manifold particular fields, the grammatical section of the science of language arrives at an ever more adequate presentation of the structure of language in its integral description.
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 has found itself in the midst of the radical advance of science characteristic of the last decades of the XX century.
In preparing the third edition of the book the author has been guided by the experience gained from its academic use since the first publication in 1983 and second publication in 1994. During this time a number of new ideas have been put forward both in general and English linguistics that should be presented to the students. It especially concerns the theory of units of language and levels of language and the linguistic study of continual text. The main additions and revisions made by the author mostly deal with these important fields of description.
Materials illustrating the analysed elements of English grammar have been mostly collected from the literary works of British and American authors. Some of the cited 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 in contextual background).
The author pays tribute to his friends and colleagues — teachers of the Moscow State Pedagogical University for encouragement and help they extended during the years of his work on the subject matter of the book.
The author wishes to express his gratitude to the staff of the Department of Grammar and History of English of the Moscow State Linguistic University, and in particular to the Head of the Department Prof. T.S. Sorokina, for the careful review of the book.
The author's sincere thanks are due to Prof. O.V. Alexandrova, Prof. N.A. Kobrina, Prof. A.T. Krivonosov, Prof. E.S. Kubryakova, Prof. F.A. Litvin, Prof. M.M. Makovsky, Prof. F.I. Mauler, Prof. S.M. Mezenin, Prof. L.L. Nyelubin, Prof. V.Y. Plotkin, Prof. G.G. Pocheptsov, Prof. S.G. Ter-Minasova, Prof. N.N. Semenyuk, Prof. Z.Y. Turayeva and all other specialists who shared with him their opinions and criticisms touching upon the matters presented. Their expert suggestions have been very helpful in bringing the text to its final shape.
M. Blokh
CHAPTER I GRAMMAR IN THE SYSTEMIC CONCEPTION OF LAn GUAGE
§ 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 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 realized 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 judgments of individual grammar compilers. The result of this "prescriptive" approach was that alongside 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 the works of distinguished authors directly contradicting this "rule".
"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 perception. Here are examples to the contrary:
My holiday at Crome isn't being a disappointment (А. Huxley). For the first time, Bobby felt, he was really seeing the man (A. Christie).
The given examples of English articles and verb-forms, 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 prominent 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 the 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 (0. 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.
§ 3. The nature of grammar as a constituent part of language is better understood in the light of explicitly discriminating the two planes of language, namely, the plane of content and the plane of expression.
The plane of content comprises the purely semantic elements contained in language, while the plane of expression comprises the material (formal) units of language taken by themselves, apart from the meanings rendered by them. The two planes are inseparably connected, so that no meaning can be realised without some material means of expression. Grammatical elements of language present a unity of content and expression (or, in somewhat more familiarterms, a unity of form and meaning). In this the grammatical elements are similar to the lingual lexical elements, though the quality of grammatical meanings, as we have stated above, is different in principle from the quality of lexical meanings.