Екзаменаційний білет № 14

1. Criteria for classification of words into parts of speech in Modern English: semantic, formal and functional. Notional and functional parts of speech.

2. The phrase and the problem of its definition. The main distinctive features of the phrase as compared with those of the word and the sentence.

3. Do the task from the card.

According to their meaning, morphological characteristics and syntactical functions, words fall under certain classes called parts of speech. We distinguish between notional and structural parts of speech.

The notional parts of speech perform certain functions in the sentence. The notional parts of speech are:

1. the noun 2. the adjective 3. the pronoun 4. the numeral 5. the verb 6. the adverb 7. the words of the category of state 8. the modal words 9. the interjection

The structural parts of speech either express relations between words or sentences or emphasize the meaning of words or sentences. They never perform any independent function in the sentence. Here belong:

1. the preposition 2. the conjunction 3. the particle 4. the article

In modern linguistics, parts of speech are discriminated according to three criteria: semantic, formal and functional. This approach may be defined as complex. The semantic criterion presupposes the grammatical meaning of the whole class of words (general grammatical meaning). The formal criterion reveals paradigmatic properties: relevant grammatical categories, the form of the words, their specific inflectional and derivational features. The functional criterion concerns the syntactic function of words in the sentence and their combinability [11, 41]. Thus, when characterizing any part of speech we must describe: a) its semantics; b) its morphological features; c) its syntactic peculiarities. In accordance with the mentioned criteria, we can classify the words of the English language into notional and functional. Notional words are defined as follows: they have full lexical meaning and independent syntactical functions in the sentence. To the notional parts of speech of the English language belong the noun, the adjective, the numeral, the pronoun, the verb, and the adverb. Functional parts of speech differ from notional ones semantically, they are words of incomplete nominative meaning and non-self-dependent, their lexical meaning is more general. Formal parts of speech serve either to express different relations between notional words, they have mediatory functions in the sentence, or they specify the meaning of the word. To the functional parts of speech belong the article, the pronoun, the preposition, the conjunction, the particle, the modal words, and the interjection

A phrase is two or more words that do not contain the subject - verb pair necessary to form a clause. Phrases can be very short or quite long. Here are two examples:

After lunch

After slithering down the stairs and across the road to scare nearly to death Mrs. Philpot busy pruning her rose bushes

Certain phrases have specific names based on the type of word that begins or governs the word group: noun phrase, verb phrase, prepositional phrase, infinitive phrase, participle phrase, gerund phrase, and absolute phrase.