Grammatical forms and categories. Grammatical category. Sound design of grammatical units

A category in a broad sense is any group of linguistic elements identified on the basis of some common property; in a broad sense - a certain feature (parameter) that underlies the division of a vast collection of homogeneous linguistic units into a limited number of non-overlapping classes, the members of which are characterized by the same meaning of a given feature (for example, the category of case, the category soul/non-soul, category of aspect) . Often, however, the term “category” refers to one of the meanings of the mentioned feature (category of the accusative case). The concept of category goes back to Aristotle, who identified 10 categories: essence, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action and suffering. The identification of these categories largely influenced the further division of parts of speech and members of a sentence.

A grammatical category is a system of opposing series of grammatical forms with homogeneous meanings. A grammatical form is a linguistic sign in which the grammatical meaning finds its regular expression. Within grammatical forms, the means of expressing grammatical meanings are affixes, phonemic alternations (internal inflection), stress patterns, reduplication, function words, word order and intonation. In the system of grammatical categories, the defining feature is the categorizing feature, for example, the generalized meaning of tense, person, voice, etc., which combines the system of meanings of individual tenses, persons and voices and the system of corresponding forms.

Grammatical categories are divided into morphological and syntactic. Among the morphological ones, there are, for example, the categories of aspect, voice, gender, number, case; The consistent expression of these categories characterizes entire grammatical classes of words (parts of speech). The number of opposed members within such categories can be different: for example, in the Russian language, the grammatical category of gender is represented by a system of three rows of forms expressing the grammatical meanings of male and female. and Wed gender, and the grammatical category of number - a system of two series of forms - units. and plural numbers. In languages with developed inflection, the gram categories are inflectional, i.e. those whose members can be represented by forms of the same word within its paradigm (for example, in Russian - tense, mood, person of the verb, number, case, gender of adjectives, degrees of comparison) and non-inflectional (classifying), i.e. . those whose members cannot be represented by forms of the same word (in Russian - gender and animate/inanimate nouns).

The languages of the world differ:

1. in terms of the number and composition of grammatical categories - for some Slavic languages the category of aspect is specific; category of definition/indeterminacy for languages with articles; the category of respectability (politeness) in Japanese and Korean;

2. by the number of opposed members within the same category (6 cases in Russian and up to 40 in Dagestan)

3. by which parts of speech contain this or that category (in Nenets nouns have the categories of person and tense)

The combination of broader and narrower categories may be different in different languages. In Russian, names and participles are declined, and Finno-Ugric names can be changed by person ("my mother", "your mother", etc. "eke-m", "eke-n", etc.)

Grammatical categories are the best studied; their characteristic features include the modifying type of categorizing feature, its involvement in syntax, the obligatory choice of one of its meanings for word forms from the categorizable set, and the presence of a regular way of expressing it. The presence of the entire set of these properties is usually the basis for unconditional recognition of the grammatical nature of a category, although each of them separately is neither a necessary nor a sufficient feature of a grammatical category.

There is not a single grammatical category that would be characteristic of all languages of the world. The discrepancy between grammatical categories in different languages is the best evidence of the specificity of the selection of grammatical categories in each language.

Thus, the category of definiteness-indeterminacy, which is very important for Romano-Germanic languages and clearly expressed in these languages with the help of articles, is absent in the Russian language, but this does not mean that Russians cannot have these meanings in their minds. They only express them lexically (pronouns). If one gramme is expressed in a language using special techniques, then the second can be expressed negatively - by the absence of a special indicator. For example, in Hebrew: bajio "house", habbajio "certain house", in Tajik, on the contrary, there is only an indefinite article. Consequently, the first property of a grammatical category is the regularity of distinguishing grammatical meanings.

Example of repetition in African and Indonesian languages; dual. The animate-inanimate division (V.p.) is unusual for ancient European languages; Also, the distinction of the category of species, even the gender of nouns, is not known to the English language and all Turkic languages.

The second property is obligatory (in Romano-Germanic languages one cannot do without certainty of uncertainty).

The number of homogeneous categories varies in different languages; Thus, in languages that have declension, the number of cases can vary from 3 (in Arabic), 4 in German, 6 in Russian, 15 in Estonian and more (Dagestan languages).

Even sometimes, when there is correspondence between languages in terms of cases, the same thing can be expressed in different cases: “I went to get firewood” (Tv.p.), and in Kazakh this is expressed in the dative case.

In morphology, it is customary to distinguish lexico-grammatical categories of words from grammatical categories - such subclasses within certain parts of speech that have a common semantic feature that affects the ability of words to express certain categorical morphological meanings. The meaning of plurality in plural forms is grammatical, in collective nouns it is a fact of lexical meaning expressed by the stem, and the grammatical method shows the singular number (fist-fists-fist), concrete, abstract, and real nouns are also distinguished; adjectives qualitative and relative, etc.

Grammatical categories changed over time: Latin did not yet have a definite article, and in Vernacular Latin the pronoun "ilia" was used so often that in the Romance languages it became a definite article. Later, the indefinite article arose from the pronoun “one”

Grammema(English) grammeme) - grammatical meaning, understood as one of the elements of the grammatical category; different grammemes of the same category are mutually exclusive and cannot be expressed together. Thus, in the Russian language, singular and plural numbers are grammes of the category of number; One or the other meaning must be expressed, but not both at the same time. Also called a grammeme grammatical indicator- plan for expressing grammatical meaning (the term proposed by J. Bybee is used in the same meaning gram, English gram), as well as the unity of meaning (plan of content) and methods of its expression.

A grammeme in a language is represented by a number of forms, united by the meaning of a component of a given grammatical category, but differing in the meanings of other categories inherent in a given part of speech: thus, the grammeme of the second person of a verb in the Russian language is represented by a number of forms, united by this meaning, but differing in the meanings of mood, tense, aspect , pledge, number. Grammemes, expressed by a number of morphological forms, constitute a morphological category. There are also grammemes expressed by syntactic forms - classes of syntactic constructions (for example, active and passive constructions) - and components of syntactic categories.

The gramme, understood as a unit of content, is correlated with the morpheme as a unit of expression. A unit of expression that correlates with grammes of several grammatical categories at the same time is called an inflectional morpheme, or inflection.

GRAMME - a component of a grammatical category, which in its meaning represents a specific concept in relation to the meaning of the grammatical. categories as a generic concept. These are, for example, G. units. and many more numbers, 1st, 2nd and 3rd persons, G. owls. and Nesov. kind. Just like grammar. the category as a whole, G. represents the unity of meaning and methods of expression. In the structure of grammatical G. category represents one of the rows of grammatical systems opposed to each other. forms constituting grammatical. category as a system. For example, rows of forms, present and past, opposed to each other. and bud. time form the structure of grammatical. categories of time. G., considered as elements of the structure of grammatical. categories are close to the “formal categories” of A. M. Peshkovsky and the “categorical forms” of A. I. Smirnitsky. Axles. structural type of G. - a number of morphological and logical. forms united by the meaning of one of the grammatical members. categories. Grammemes of this type form morphological. categories. At the same time, G. can be represented syntactically. forms - syntactic classes. structures (cf. active and passive structures). Such G. are components of syntactic. categories. A number of grammatical forms that make up the structure of a grammar include forms that are combined by the meaning of the component of a given grammatical. categories, io differ from the point of view. other categories inherent in this part of speech. For example, G. 2nd l. verb in Russian language is represented by a number of forms, united by the meaning of the 2nd line, but differing in mood, tense, aspect, voice, number. In some languages (synthetic aglutinating type, etc.), a generic concept fixed grammatically. category, may at the same time be the meaning of one of the G. (for example, this is, according to V. Z. Panfilov, the ratio of singular and plural forms in the Nivkh language). The indicated two-sided (content-formal) understanding of G. reveals one of the meanings of this term. Its other meaning appears in those cases when it is used only in relation to the content plan and is interpreted as an elementary unit of grammatical. meanings. The second meaning of the term hG." does not contradict the first, since it is always assumed that G. has one or another formal expression.

There are also grammatical categories that are syntactically identified (relational), i.e., indicating primarily the compatibility of forms as part of a phrase or sentence (in Russian - gender, case) and non-syntactically identified (nominative), i.e. expressing, first of all, semantic abstractions abstracted from the properties, connections and relations of extra-linguistic reality (in Russian, type, time); grammatical categories such as number or person combine features of both of these types.

So, we found out that grammar (as a branch of linguistics) includes morphology and syntax. The focus of grammar is on grammatical meanings and ways of expressing them. Grammatical meaning- this is the generalized meaning inherent in words or syntactic constructions, realized in these units in relation to other words in the sentence. Remember the famous experimental phrase of L. V. Shcherba: “The glok kuzdra shteko budlaned the bokr and curled the bokrenka” - This includes words with artificial roots and real affixes, which are the expressers of grammatical meanings. Despite the ambiguity of the lexical meaning of words, their belonging to certain parts of speech is easily revealed, and the grammatical meanings inherent in the words of this sentence indicate that one action has already taken place in the past (budlanula), and another actually continues in the present (kurdyachit). Each grammatical meaning has a formal expression, for example, it can be expressed using:

1) word endings (he sang - she sang or cat - cats);
2) suffixes ( invent - invented - invented - invented);
3) alternation of sounds in the roots of words ( avoid - avoid, dial - dial);
4) reduplication, or repetition ( far, far away(very far));
5) movement of the accent (for example, at home - at home);
6) combinations of some words with linking verbs, particles, prepositions (I will teach, I would learn, let him learn, will they come to you);
7) word order (I saw my brother. I saw my brother. I saw my brother.);
8) intonation (He came? He came!).

A sign of a language in which a grammatical meaning is given a regular expression is called a grammatical form. Grammatical forms are grouped into grammatical categories. Academician Vinogradov believed that “it would be more appropriate instead of using the term form use the term external exponent of a grammatical category." The grammatical categories of each language can be likened to a kind of “questionnaires” necessary to describe objects in a given language: a speaker cannot correctly talk about any subject without answering the questions of such a “grammatical questionnaire”. The number of grammatical categories varies across languages; There are languages with a very developed system of such categories, while in other languages the set of grammatical categories is limited.

THIS IS INTERESTING

One of the books of the Soviet science fiction writer G. Gora describes a not at all fantastic conversation between a Russian mathematics teacher and his student Not, a representative of the northern Nivkh people living on Sakhalin. " The problems were easy, very simple, but Noth could not solve them. It was necessary to add six more to seven trees and subtract five from thirty buttons.

- What trees? - asked Noth, - long or short? And what kind of buttons: round?
- In mathematics, I answered, the quality or form of the object does not matter. <...>

Not understood me. And I didn’t understand it right away either. He explained to me that the Nivkhs have some numerals to designate long objects, others for short ones, and others for round objects.”

Grammatical category- This system grammatical forms with uniform meaning. The main grammatical categories include the categories type, voice, tense, mood(at the verb) person, gender, number and case(at names). The consistent expression of these categories characterizes entire classes of words (parts of speech). In modern Russian there are independent (notional) and auxiliary parts of speech.

Independent parts of speech

Part of speech		Grammatical meaning and categories
Noun	And other case questions	Denotes an animate or inanimate object, has the categories of gender, number, case, animate and inanimate	Man, house, greenery
Adjective	Which? Which? Whose? And etc.		human,
Numeral	How many? Which one? And etc.	Denotes the quantity or order of objects, has the category of number. Digits by meaning: quantitative, collective	Five, seventy-seven, first, second, three
Pronoun	Who? What? Which?	Indicates an object, attribute or number of objects, but does not call them “by name”. It has the categories of gender, number and case. Places by meaning: personal, demonstrative, interrogative, etc.	I, you, he, all, the one whose, mine, which
	What to do? What to do?	The action of an object or its state. Has the categories of aspect, voice, mood, person, tense, gender and number	Have fun, have fun
	Where? When? Where? Where? How?	Sign of action or sign of attribute. Some adverbs have a state category	Fast, fun, from afar, left, right

But auxiliary parts of speech do not have grammatical categories.

Functional parts of speech

In the Russian language there is another class of unchangeable words that serve to express emotions. These words are called interjections. They are neither an independent nor an auxiliary part of speech. They differ from significant words by the absence of a nominative meaning: while expressing feelings and sensations, interjections do not name them, and what distinguishes interjections from auxiliary parts of speech is that they do not have a connecting function.

Many interjections originate from emotional exclamations, for example: “Oh, scary!”, “Brr, it’s cold!” Such interjections often have a specific phonetic appearance, that is, they contain rare and unusual sound combinations for the Russian language (“brr”, “um”, “tpr”). There is another group of interjections in the Russian language, the origin of which is associated with significant words - nouns: “father”, “god” or with verbs: “ish”, “wish”, “pli”. You can also observe the connection of interjections with pronouns, adverbs, particles and conjunctions: “that-and-such”, “eka”, “sh-sh”. This includes various kinds of adjuncts: “on you,” “well, yes,” etc. and stable phrases and phraseological units, such as “fathers of light,” “thank God,” etc. Interjections are an actively expanding class of words. There is no single point of view among linguists: some believe that interjections are part of the system of parts of speech, but stand in isolation in it. Others are sure that interjections are included in the category of “particles of speech” along with prepositions and conjunctions.

Discussing what we read

1. How are the branches of the science of language - morphemics and word formation - related to each other?
2. Why are the main ways of forming words in the Russian language divided into two groups? What are these groups?
3. What do you think is the difference between the terms “morpheme” and “word part”?
4. What is studied in morphology? Is it possible to study morphology without knowing about morphemes?
5. What is the “grammar of a language”? What grammatical rules do you know?
6. In what cases is the term “grammatical form” necessary and in what cases do we use the term “grammatical category”?
7. How do independent parts of speech differ from auxiliary parts? What, in your opinion, is the peculiarity of interjections?

Tasks

1. Define a morpheme. Explain the functions of morphemes.
a) Find formative morphemes in the words:

at home, house, to the river, ran, lie down, strongest, strongest, stronger, lying down, seen.

b) Find word-forming morphemes in the words:

2. Talk about the grammatical categories of nouns.
a) Choose an adjective or pronoun for the nouns:

tulle, alibi, piano, mouse, jabot, taxi, vermicelli, shampoo, hummingbird, chimpanzee, coffee, cocoa, coat, mango, penalty, credo, metro, slob, orphan, colleague.

b) Decline nouns:

sister, banner, tribe, spear, cloud, beans, kiwi, stockings, socks, cakes.

On... the sides of the road, on... the banks of the river, with... girlfriends, with... friends, on... walls, between... countries, between... states,... hands, . .. eyes, at... children, put to... cheeks, familiar with... brothers, with... sisters.

3. Read the phrases aloud, declining the numerals correctly.

In 2009, in 55% of cases, out of 1835 examples, to 769 students, paid 879 rubles, posted on 83 pages, 274 pages are missing, helped 249 people, about 97 cases were registered, satisfied with 12 students, the life of a tree is measured at 350 and even 600 years.

This is the most wonderful person I have ever met.

Literature

1. Arutyunova N. D. On significant units of language // Studies on the general theory of grammar. M., 1968.
2. Arutyunova N. D., Bulygina T. V. Basic unit of morphological analysis // General linguistics. Internal structure of language. M., 1972.
3. Bebchuk E. M. Modern Russian language: Morphemics and word formation: textbook, manual. Voronezh, 2007.
4. Bondarko A. V. Theory of morphological categories. L., 1976.
5. Bondarko A. V. Theory of meaning in the system of functional grammar. M., 2002.
6. Pekhlivanova K. I., Lebedeva M. N. Russian grammar in illustrations: textbook, manual. M., 2006.

CHAPTER 4

Vocabulary and phraseology; types of phraseological units, their use in speech; use of figurative and expressive means in speech; lexical norms; main types of dictionaries

Gore G. The Magic Road: Novels, stories, stories. L., 1978.
See: Vinogradov V.V. Russian language. M., 1972.

GRAMMAR CATEGORY, a system of opposing series of grammatical forms with homogeneous meanings. In this system, the defining feature is the categorizing feature (see Language category), for example, the generalized meaning of tense, person, voice, etc., which unites the system of meanings of individual tenses, persons, voices, etc. into the system of appropriate forms. A necessary feature of a grammatical category is the unity of its meaning and the expression of this meaning in the system of grammatical forms.

Grammatical categories are divided into morphological and syntactic. Among the morphological grammatical categories, there are, for example, the grammatical categories of aspect, voice, tense, mood, person, gender, number, case; The consistent expression of these categories characterizes entire grammatical classes of words (parts of speech). The number of opposed members within such categories can be different: for example, in the Russian language, the grammatical category of gender is represented by a system of three rows of forms expressing the grammatical meanings of masculine, feminine and neuter, and the grammatical category of number is represented by a system of two rows of forms - singular and plural . In languages with developed inflection, grammatical categories are inflectional, that is, those whose members can be represented by forms of the same word within its paradigm (for example, in Russian - tense, mood, person of the verb, number, case, gender, degrees comparisons of adjectives) and non-inflectional (classifying, classification), that is, those whose members cannot be represented by forms of the same word (for example, in Russian - gender and animate-inanimate nouns). The belonging of some grammatical categories (for example, in Russian - aspect and voice) to an inflectional or non-inflectional type is the subject of debate.

There are also grammatical categories that are syntactically identified, that is, indicating, first of all, the compatibility of forms as part of a phrase or sentence (for example, in Russian - gender, case), and non-syntactically identified, that is, expressing, first of all, various semantic abstractions, abstract from the properties, connections and relations of extra-linguistic reality (for example, in Russian - type, time); grammatical categories such as number or person combine features of both of these types.

The languages of the world differ:

1) by the number and composition of grammatical categories; compare, for example, the category of verb aspect specific to some languages - Slavic and others; the category of the so-called grammatical class - person or thing - in a number of Caucasian languages; the category of definiteness-indeterminacy, inherent primarily in languages with articles; the category of politeness, or respectfulness, characteristic of a number of Asian languages (in particular, Japanese and Korean) and associated with the grammatical expression of the speaker’s attitude towards the interlocutor and the persons in question;

2) by the number of opposed members within the same category; compare the traditionally identified 6 cases in the Russian language and up to 40 in some Dagestan ones;

3) by which parts of speech contain one or another category (for example, in the Nenets language, nouns have the categories of person and tense). These characteristics may change during the historical development of one language; compare three forms of number in Old Russian, including dual, and two in modern Russian.

Lit.: Shcherba L.V. About parts of speech in the Russian language // Shcherba L.V. Selected works on the Russian language. M., 1957; Gukhman M. M. Grammatical category and structure of paradigms // Research on the general theory of grammar. M., 1968; Katsnelson S. D. Typology of language and speech thinking. L., 1972; Lomtev T. P. Sentence and its grammatical categories. M., 1972; Typology of grammatical categories. Meshchaninov readings. M., 1973; Bondarko A. V. Theory of morphological categories. L., 1976; Panfilov V. 3. Philosophical problems of linguistics. M., 1977; Lyons J. Introduction to theoretical linguistics. M., 1978; Kholodovich A. A. Problems of grammatical theory. L., 1979; Russian grammar. M., 1980. T. 1. P. 453-459; Typology of grammatical categories. L., 1991; Melchuk I. A. Course of general morphology. M., 1998. T. 2. Part 2; Gak V.G. Theoretical grammar of the French language. M., 2004.

The most general meaning of a verb is the meaning of a process; it includes particular meanings: actions ( read), states ( turn pale), process ( melt), movements ( fly).

Constant grammatical features: type, pledge, recurrence, transitivity (manifests in context). These features are characteristic of all forms of the verb and are actually verbal (as well as the categories of mood and tense). The type of verb conjugation is also constant.

Inconsistent grammatical features: mood, as well as (if any) tense, person, number, gender. These features are not present in all verb forms and appear differently in different forms. For example, in the past tense, personal forms of the verb do not have a person meaning, but have a gender category; Only participles have a case category. The categories of person, gender and number are not proper verbal.

All verbal forms (infinitive, personal forms, gerunds, participles) have the characteristics of aspect, voice, reflexivity, and transitivity. Personal forms can change according to moods, tenses, persons, numbers, and in the past tense according to gender. The participle (verb-nominal form) can also change according to cases and gender.

View– a grammatical category expressing the way an action occurs. Imperfect verbs denote actions that take place without indicating their completion: think, understand, swim, blush. Perfect Verbs indicate a limit, a limitation of an action to a beginning or an end. For example, an action with a start designation: sing, shout, start; actions indicating completion: decide, commit, turn green. Most perfective verbs have prefixes.

The category of type is related to the category of time. Imperfective verbs have three forms of tense: present, past and future complex: I am drawing, I have been drawing, I will draw. Perfective verbs have two forms of tense: future simple and past: I'll draw, drew.

Groups of verbs by aspect

Most verbs can form species pairs, differing not in the lexical, but only in the grammatical meaning of the form. Species pairs are formed using: 1) prefix: did - did; 2) suffixes -yva- / -iva-, -va-, -a-, -nu-, etc.: sow - sow, raise - raise, dry up - dry up; 3) moving the accent: narezat – rifling A t , diss.sfall - crumbleAt; 4) in a suppletive way: take - take, put - put, catch - catch.

Monotype verbs- these are verbs that form only one form, either perfect or only imperfect. They can be prefixed or non-prefixed. Verbs only imperfective form indicate repetition, duration, intermittency, etc.: touch, fight, regret, talk, row. Perfect verbs only denote actions that have mandatory completion, occur instantly and have a result: rise up, rush, wake up, pass, come to your senses. The reason for the inability to form a species pair is the semantics of verbs or morphological structure.

Bi-aspect verbs- verbs that, with the same graphic shell, can, in context, become either perfect verbs or imperfect verbs, without changing their form. Wed: The detachment attacked the heights for a long time and unsuccessfully (what did they do?). Yesterday the detachment (what did it do?) attacked and captured the heights. The following verbs are classified as two-type: wound, execute, marry, marry, say, promise, start, bestow, borrow, telegraph and etc.

Transitive verbs called an action directed at an object (subject, person). These are verbs of creation ( create, weave), destruction ( break, burn), perception ( see, feel), emotional attitude towards the subject ( be in love, charm), verbs of speech and thought ( ask, ponder).

There are directly transitive (properly transitive) and indirectly transitive verbs. Straightforward have an addition in the accusative case without a preposition: read a book, build a house or genitive (when denoting a part or when negating, with verbs to want, to desire): drank tea, bring some water, didn’t read the new newspaper. Indirect-transitive verbs denote actions aimed at an object, but the object can be in the indirect case with a preposition: take care of your sister, help your neighbor, manage your business.

Intransitive verbs denote actions that do not transfer to the subject. Intransitive verbs include verbs denoting: 1) being, existence: to be, to be; 2) movement: walk, swim, ride; 3) physical and mental state: get sick, get angry, stand; 4) type of activity: teach, carpenter; 5) behavior: to be brave, to be young; 6) auditory and visual perception: sparkle, knock etc. Additions to such verbs can be with or without prepositions and are in indirect cases, except for the accusative: show off your knowledge, burn in the fire, take it off the shelf.

Verbs with the postfix -сь/-ся are intransitive.

Among intransitive verbs, a special type of verbs with the postfix -sya (-s) is distinguished. (Postfix -sya is used after a consonant, postfix -sya – after a vowel). Such verbs have a reflexive category, which conveys special semantic meanings. Depending on their meaning, reflexive verbs are presented in several groups:

1) self-reflexive: the subject’s action is directed towards himself: wash, comb your hair, tune in, humiliate yourself; these verbs can usually be restructured into a construction with a pronoun myself;

2) mutually reciprocal: actions of several subjects directed at each other, each of which is both the subject and the object of a similar action: make up, meet, kiss;

3) indirectly reciprocal: the action is performed by the subject in his own interests: be built(build a house for yourself) fit in(pack your things); possible to rebuild in a design with words for yourself, for yourself;

4) general return: the action of the subject, closed in the sphere of his state: worry, be happy, get angry, have fun; worry and some others.

Most reflexive verbs can form a correlative pair without the postfix -sya: knock - knock, smoke - smoke. However, in the Russian language there are verbs that do not have such correlative pairs, are “only reflexive” and are not used without the postfix -sya: be afraid, be proud, be lazy, hope, try and so on.

The category of voice expresses the relationship between the subject, the action and the object on which the action is performed. Active voice The verb indicates that the subject is named by the subject who himself performs the action. A student writes a note. I'll waste my time on you. Passive voice indicates that the subject names an object that is subject to action from another object or person: The abstract is written by the student. Time wasted on you.

The passive voice can be expressed: 1) by the postfix -сь/-ся: The consequences of the hurricane are being eliminated; 2) forms of passive participles: The problem is solved.

They do not have voice forms: 1) all intransitive verbs: go, run and so on.; 2) verbs with the postfix -sya that do not have a pair without this postfix: be afraid, wake up; 3) personal verbs in an impersonal meaning with the postfix -sya: I couldn’t sleep, I was breathing easily.

Indicative denotes a real action that has happened, is happening or will happen. Verbs in the indicative mood change according to tenses (they have forms of present, past and future tense).

Subjunctive (conditional) mood denotes an unreal action that can occur under certain conditions or is expected or desired. Forms of the subjunctive mood change only by gender and number: I would play in the yard, fix my car, read my memoirs.

Imperative mood expresses a request, wish, order and is expressed by verbs outside tense forms. Forms of the imperative mood are formed, as a rule, from the stem of the present tense (for imperfective verbs) or the future tense (for perfective verbs). There is no first person singular in imperative verbs; there is no plural form with a call to perform a joint action - we read or let's read- homonymous to present tense forms. The most common verbs are in the form of the 2nd and 3rd person, singular and plural. The 2nd person singular forms have two types of endings: -and or zero ending: write and readØ. The 2nd person plural forms are formed by adding the postfix -te to the singular form: write and readØ-those. When forming forms of the imperative mood, some verbs exhibit alternation in the root: V And t - in e y, w And t - w e th. The 3rd person singular and plural forms are formed using the particles let, let: let him read, let him read. A special analytical form of the imperative mood is formed using the particle let's (let's) and the imperfective infinitive with the meaning of a call to joint action: let's read, let's decide.

A number of verbs in the formation of forms of the imperative mood have the following features: 1) alternation of i/e in the roots of verbs like beat, drink, sew – hit, drink, shake; 2) preservation of the suffix -va-, which is absent in the present tense form, but is in the infinitive: give - give - come on, get up - get up - get up; 3) at the verb lie down imperative form lie down; 4) at the verb drive suppletive form of the imperative mood go.

For some verbs, the forms of the imperative mood are either not formed at all or are not used: see, hear, want, feel ill.

In Russian, forms of some moods can be used to mean others: Would you like to work today?(subjunctive mood in the sense of imperative). Come back on time - nothing would have happened(imperative mood in the meaning of the subjunctive). In the meaning of the subjunctive mood, the infinitive can be used: You should study.

Time category – This is an inflectional category that denotes the correlation of an action to the moment of speech. Present tense is the action at the moment of speech, past tense is the action preceding the moment of speech, future tense is the action that will take place after the moment of speech. The forms of the present and future tenses do not have a special grammatical design; the forms of the past tense are expressed by the suffix -l- or a zero suffix with the same meaning: read-l , brought-Ø . Only imperfective verbs have the present tense. The future tense of imperfective verbs is formed using the auxiliary verb to be: I will read, you will read, will read(complex form). If there are several future tense verbs in a sentence, then the auxiliary verb is usually used once: I will sing and dance. Perfective verbs have a simple future form: read, read, read.

In speech, verbs of one tense can be used to mean another : We're going to sea tomorrow(form of the present tense in the meaning of the future). So I believed you(form of the past tense in the meaning of the future).

Face category indicates the producer of the action in relation to the speaker. The first person singular (I) shows that the subject of the action is the speaker himself; first person plural (we) – speaker and others. The second person singular (you) shows that the subject of the action is the interlocutor; in the plural (you) – interlocutor and others. The third person singular (he, she, it) shows that the subject of the action is someone not participating in the dialogue; in the plural (they) – someone not participating in the dialogue, and others.

In addition to the indicated meanings of personal forms, in modern Russian the following are used: 1) forms of the 1st person plural in the meaning of “the author's we” instead of “I” in the scientific style: we consider this fact, we conducted an experiment; 2) forms of the 1st person plural in the meaning of the 2nd person to express complicity in emotionally expressive speech: how do we feel?; 3) 2nd person plural forms are used to express politeness: You told us.

Formal indicators of the category of a person are personal endings: -у (-у), -ем (-им), -еж (-ish), -ete (-ITE), -ut (-yut), -at (-yat).

The category of face is related to the categories of tense and inclination. Only verbs of the present and future tenses of the indicative and imperative mood have facial forms. The category of person is absent in past tense verbs and subjunctive verbs.

Some verbs in Russian do not have all forms of person, i.e. are insufficient. There are no 1st person forms for verbs to dare, to win, to find oneself, to be strange. Verbs lack 1st and 2nd person forms calve, foal, grow, bud off, get closer, appear. Along with “insufficient” verbs in the Russian language there are verbs that have not one, but two systems of finite forms, i.e. are redundant: splash - splash / splash, torment - torment / torment, coo - coo / coo. Between these forms there is usually either a semantic or stylistic difference. If you splash, you spew out splashes, you splash; you spray - you spray. They coo (colloquial); kurlychut (neutral).

Impersonal verbs

Verbs that do not have a person form and denote actions or states that occur on their own, without subjectivity, are called impersonal. Impersonal verbs do not change according to persons, numbers and genders. They can be used in the infinitive, indicative mood (in the past, present and future tense) and subjunctive mood. They can be with or without a postfix. With impersonal verbs it is impossible to use a subject: It will begin to get light soon. It's getting dark. It was getting dark. It would chill.

Some personal verbs in Russian can be used in the meaning of impersonal ones: The forest is getting dark(personal verb). It gets dark early in winter(personal verb in impersonal meaning). Impersonal verbs and personal verbs in an impersonal meaning mean: 1) natural phenomena: it will rain, it's getting dark; 2) human condition: has a fever, chills; 3) sensations, feelings: I'm unlucky; 4) being: there was no time; 5) obligation: do not be sad.

Genus category denotes a characteristic of the gender of a noun or pronoun with which the verb is coordinated or agreed. In the absence of a subject of action, the gender form indicates the gender of the possible subject of the action: The sun was shining. The grass was turning green. The cloud was floating. I would come today. The neuter gender can also indicate the impersonality of the verb: It was getting dark.

Not all verb forms have a gender category. The singular forms of the past tense of the indicative mood, the singular forms of the conditional mood, and all participial forms have meanings of masculine, feminine or neuter gender.

Number indicates the singularity or multiplicity of the subject performing the actions, while the meaning of the action does not change: The student has arrived. The students came. This morphological characteristic is inherent in all personal verb forms. The infinitive and the gerund have no number forms. The plural of a verb in a one-part sentence indicates the uncertainty of the subject: There's a knock on the door. The singular number may indicate impersonality: I'm shivering.

Relationship between verb categories

1. Aspect and tense: perfective verbs have two tense forms (there are no present tense forms), the future tense form is simple. Imperfective verbs have three tense forms (there is a present tense form), the future tense form is complex.

2. Tense and mood: verbs change tenses only in the indicative mood, and in the imperative and conditional moods there is no morphological characteristic of tense.

3. Person and gender: these categories of a verb are mutually exclusive and cannot be presented in the same form. The category of person is present in the forms of the verb in the present and future tense of the indicative mood and in the forms of the verb in the imperative mood, and the gender is found in the forms of the verb in the past tense of the indicative mood and in the forms of the conditional mood.

4. Transitivity and reflexivity: reflexive verbs are intransitive.

5. Transitivity and voice: passive constructions are formed only from directly transitive verbs. Transitive verbs are generally capable of forming passive forms.

GRAMMAR CATEGORIES, specially organized and expressed sets of linguistic meanings (“grammemes”) that have a privileged status in the language system; Each language has its own grammatical categories, but many essential meanings for human experience are included in the grammatical categories of a very large number of languages (such as, for example, the values of the number of objects, the duration of an action, the time of action relative to the moment of speech, the subject and object of an action, desirability, etc. .).

To be considered a grammatical category, a set of meanings must have at least two properties, namely categoricality and commitment. The first property (also known under the names of mutual exclusivity, paradigmaticity, homogeneity, functionality, etc.) allows us to select from the entire set of linguistic meanings those that are combined into categories; the second identifies among linguistic categories those that are grammatical for a given language. A category can only be a set of values whose elements exclude each other, i.e. cannot simultaneously characterize the same object (this property can be formulated in another way: each object at a certain moment can be assigned only one value from this set). Thus, the property of categoricality, or mutual exclusivity in the normal case, is possessed by the values of physical age (a person cannot be both an old man and a child), gender, size, and many others. In contrast, meanings such as color are not categories: the same object may well be colored in different colors at the same time.

Not all linguistic categories, however, can be considered grammatical. To do this, it is necessary that the category satisfies the second property, i.e. the property of obligatory nature (in modern linguistics this statement has received wide recognition, mainly after the works of R. Jacobson, but similar ideas have been expressed before). A category is obligatory (for a certain class of words) if every word from this class expresses any meaning of this category. Thus, in the Russian language, for example, the category of verb tense is obligatory: every personal form of the verb in the text expresses one of the meanings of this category (either past, present, or future tense), and there is no such personal form of the verb about which it was possible would say that she has “no time”, i.e. not characterized by tense grammatically.

The existence of obligatory categories in a language means that the speaker, when planning to use a word in speech, is forced to express with this word one of the meanings of a certain category (i.e., characterize this word according to this category). Thus, when choosing the personal form of a verb, a Russian speaker is obliged to characterize it by aspect, tense, mood, voice, person/number (or, in the past tense, gender) of the subject, since all these are grammatical categories of the Russian verb. The speaker is obliged to indicate the appropriate meanings of grammatical categories, even if this is not part of his own communicative intention - for example, he may not have specifically intended to indicate the time of action. Of course, the speaker can still avoid indicating tense - but then he will no longer have to use a verb, but, for example, a noun, which in Russian does not have a mandatory tense category. Wed. a couple of species You came ~ your arrival, where grammatical tense is expressed only in the first case; If desired, this can be done in the second case (cf. your past/future arrival etc.), but it is important that if the speaker wants to evade expressing time with a noun, he can freely do this without violating the grammatical requirements of the language, whereas in the case of the verb form this is impossible.

The grammatical categories of each language can be likened to a kind of questionnaire for the description of objects and situations in a given language: the speaker cannot successfully complete this description without answering (whether he wants to or not) the questions of such a “grammatical questionnaire”. As R. Jacobson aptly notes, “the main difference between languages is not what can or cannot be expressed, but what should or should not be communicated by speakers.” This implies the importance of the role that grammar plays in creating the so-called “naive picture of the world”, i.e. that way of reflecting reality, which constitutes the specificity of each language (and the culture behind it), since it is in the system of grammatical categories that the collective experience of the speakers of a given language is primarily reflected.

The number of grammatical categories varies in different languages; There are languages with a very developed “grammatical profile”; in other languages the set of grammatical categories is very limited (languages completely devoid of grammatical meanings are still not attested, although their existence, generally speaking, does not contradict linguistic theory).

Along with the two main properties indicated above, grammatical categories, as a rule, are characterized by a number of additional properties. The area of applicability of a grammatical category (i.e. the set of those words for which the category is obligatory) must be large enough and have natural boundaries (as a rule, these are large semantic-grammatical classes of words such as nouns or verbs or their subclasses such as transitive verbs, animate nouns and so on.). On the other hand, the number of meanings of a grammatical category (grammes) is usually small, and they are expressed using a small number of regular indicators. These three additional properties make it possible, in particular, to distinguish between grammatical and so-called lexical obligatoriness (the latter is always tied to a small group of words, and the corresponding meanings do not have regular indicators). Thus, in Russian, the choice of the meaning “child of the same parents” is necessarily accompanied by an indication of the child’s gender (accordingly, Brother or sister), however, we cannot talk about the grammatical category “gender of a relative” for the reasons listed above: the obligatory indication of gender in the Russian language is characteristic of only a small group of nouns (terms of kinship), and at the same time there are no special indicators of male or female gender as part of these I have no words. Lexical obligatoryness is a very common phenomenon, but it characterizes individual groups of vocabulary of a given language and is not systemic in nature.

The meaning of grammemes of grammatical categories is a very complex object; entities called grammatical meanings (for example, “plural”, “dative case”, “past tense”, etc.), as a rule, are much more complex than lexical meanings. One should not identify the name of a gramme with its meaning (as authors of grammatical descriptions often do, wittingly or unwittingly): behind a name like “plural” there is in fact a certain set of contextual meanings expressed by a set of formal indicators, and each indicator can have any of given values, and any value can be assigned to any of these indicators. Thus, in Russian, number is expressed differently depending on the type of declension of the noun and other factors (cf. fingers,Houses,apples,stu-ya etc.), and plural forms - regardless of what indicator is present in them - can express not only a simple set of objects, but also a class of objects as a whole ( ostriches are dying out), different varieties or varieties of objects ( precious metals,cheeses), a large number of ( sands), uncertainty ( are there any free places? ""at least one place"), etc. This situation is typical for most grammes, which, therefore, in the general case, are only a kind of labels denoting a rather complex correspondence between the formal and substantive elements of the language.

The contextual meanings of grammes may include an appeal to both the properties of the surrounding world and the syntactic properties of other words. Meanings of the first type are called semantic (or semantically filled, nominative, etc.); meanings of the second type are called syntactic (or relational), which reflects their main property - to serve the expression of syntactic connections between words in the text, and not a direct description of reality (cf., for example, gender grammes in Russian nouns like sofa And ottoman, reflecting only the difference in their matching models: a big sofa And large ottoman). Syntactic meanings are present to one degree or another in almost every grammatical category (for example, in Russian, the syntactic uses of number include the appearance of the singular in constructions with numerals like three Houses , twenty one house or in distributive constructions like advisers put on nose glasses). There are also grammatical categories in which syntactic meanings predominate or are even the only ones. Such categories are called syntactic; The most important of them include the gender and case of nouns, and in some cases also the voice and mood of verbs. Languages that lack syntactic grammatical categories are called insulating(These are primarily the Austroasiatic, Thai and Sino-Tibetan languages of Southeast Asia, the Mande and Kwa languages of West Africa, etc.).

Most often, grammemes are expressed using morphological means - affixes (which include prefixes, suffixes, infixes, circumfixes and transfixes), as well as alternations and reduplications. The morphological expression of grammes is characteristic of agglutinative and fusional languages (in the latter, non-affixal morphological technique also plays a significant role). The most striking examples of fusion languages are Sanskrit, ancient Greek, Lithuanian, many languages of the Indians of North America, etc.; There are widespread languages that have equal features of agglutinativity and fusion (such as, for example, many Uralic, Mongolian, Semitic languages, Bantu languages, etc.). At the same time, there is also a non-morphological way of expressing grammatical meanings, in which these latter are conveyed by independent word forms (“function words”) or syntactic constructions. Languages with a predominance of non-morphological techniques for expressing grammatical meanings are called analytical (such, in particular, are the Polynesian languages).

If a grammatical category is structured in such a way that all its grammes are capable of being alternately attached to the stem of the same word, then such a category is called inflectional, and combinations of its grammes with the stem of a word are grammatical forms of this word. The totality of all grammatical forms of one word forms its paradigm, and a word, understood as the totality of all its forms, is called a lexeme. Typical examples of inflectional categories are the case of a noun, tense and mood of a verb, etc.: thus, in the normal case, the stem of each noun is combined with indicators of all cases of a given language, the stem of each verb - with indicators of all moods, etc. (non-systematic violations of this principle lead to the emergence of so-called defective paradigms, cf. the absence of a genitive plural form in the word cod or 1st person unit forms. verb numbers win In russian language).

Not all grammatical categories, however, form paradigms of grammatical forms: a situation is also possible when only one gramme can be expressed at the base of a word. Such grammatical categories contrast not different forms of the same word, but different words (i.e., different lexemes) and are called word-classifying. A typical example of a word-classifying category is the gender of nouns: for example, in the Russian language, each noun belongs to one of three genders, but Russian nouns do not have the ability to form “gender paradigms” (i.e., freely change the meaning of gender). On the contrary, in Russian adjectives the category of gender, as is easy to see, is inflectional (cf. paradigms like white ~ white ~ white etc.).

The main syntactic grammatical categories are gender and case (for a name) and voice (for a verb): gender is associated with the morphological expression of agreement, and case is associated with the morphological expression of control. In addition, both case and voice provide a distinction between the semantic and syntactic arguments of the verb, i.e. syntactic entities such as subject and objects, and semantic entities such as agent, patient, instrument, place, reason, and many others. etc. Syntactic (concordant) categories also include person/number and gender of the verb.

Most of the grammatical categories found in the languages of the world belong to semantic categories. The specific semantic categories of nouns are number and determination (or, in the “European” version, definiteness/indeterminacy). The categories of number, determination and case closely interact and are often expressed by a single grammatical indicator (inflection); inflectional case-numeral paradigms are also characteristic of the Russian language. The category of number is usually represented by two grammemes (singular and plural), but in a number of languages there is also a dual number, initially associated, apparently, with the designation of paired objects (such as lips, eyes, shores and so on.); the dual number was in ancient Greek, Sanskrit, ancient Russian, classical Arabic; it is also attested in modern languages: Slovenian, Koryak, Selkup, Khanty, etc. Even more rare is a special grammatical expression for a set of three objects (triple number) or a small number of objects (paucal number): such grammemes are found, for example, in languages New Guinea.

The system of semantic grammatical categories of the verb is very diverse and varies greatly in different languages. With some degree of convention, verbal categories can be divided into three large semantic zones: aspectual, temporal and modal. Aspectual (or aspectual) meanings include all those that describe the features of the unfolding of a situation in time (duration, limitation, repetition) or highlight certain temporal phases of the situation (for example, the initial stage or result); in this sense, the well-known characteristic of aspect as the “internal tense” of the verb is correct. On the contrary, the grammatical category, traditionally called “time” in linguistics, only indicates the relative chronology of a given situation, i.e. whether it takes place before, simultaneously or after some other situation (“reference point”). The starting point can be arbitrary (and in this case we have the category of relative time, or taxis), but it can also be fixed; a fixed point of reference, coinciding with the moment of utterance of the utterance (“the moment of speech”), gives the category of absolute time with three main grammes: past, present and future tense. An additional indication of the degree of remoteness of the situation from the moment of speech (indication of “temporal distance”) can increase the number of grammes in the category of time; developed systems for marking temporal distance are especially characteristic of the Bantu languages (Tropical Africa). Aspect and tense are often expressed jointly in verbal word forms (hence the traditional grammatical nomenclature, in which any aspectual verb form could be called “tense”). The most typical combinations are the continuous aspect and the past tense (commonly called “imperfect”), as well as the limited aspect and past tense (commonly called “aorist”).

The verbal system can be characterized by a large number of aspectual grammes: thus, to the basic opposition of long (durative, imperfect) and limited (perfective, point) aspects, at least habitual (and/or multiple) aspects are often added (as, for example, in many Turkic languages). aspect and effective aspect (cf. window open , Russian dial He having drunk ). A difference similar to the habitual aspect in Russian can be expressed lexically, cf. boy coming to school And boy walks to school. A special type of the resultative aspect is the perfect, which is very widespread in the languages of the world (for example, the perfect is found in English, Spanish, Greek, Finnish, Bulgarian, Persian and many other languages). On the contrary, “poor” aspectual systems (such as East or West Slavic) are characterized by the opposition of only two aspectual grammes (called perfect vs. imperfect, perfect vs. imperfect, complete vs. incomplete, etc.), but each These grammes have a very wide range of contextual meanings. Thus, in the Russian language, an imperfective grammeme can express duration, repetition, habituality, and even the perfect (cf. Maksim read « War and Peace"); the choice of one interpretation or another depends on the context, the lexical semantics of the verb and other factors. In languages with “rich” aspectual systems (such as Turkic, Polynesian or Bantu), all these meanings can differ morphologically.

The zone of verbal modality (giving the grammatical category of mood) has the most complex and branched structure. Modal meanings include, firstly, those that indicate the degree of reality of the situation (unreal situations do not take place in reality, but are possible, probable, desired, conditional, etc.), and secondly, those that express the speaker’s assessment of the situation being described (for example, the degree of reliability of the situation, the degree of desirability of the situation for the speaker, etc.). It is easy to see that evaluative and unreal meanings are often closely related to each other: thus, desired situations always have a positive assessment by the speaker, unreal situations often have a lower degree of reliability, etc. It is therefore no coincidence that the use, for example, of the conditional mood to express doubt or incomplete certainty, which is characteristic of many languages of the world.

A special place among mood grammes is occupied by the imperative, which combines the expression of the speaker’s desire with the expression of an impulse directed at the addressee. The imperative is one of the most common grammes in natural languages (perhaps this meaning is universal). Mood grammes also have a large share of syntactic uses (for example, in many languages, the predicate of a subordinate clause must take the form of one of the unreal moods; the same applies to the expression of questions or negations).

Adjacent to the mood is the grammatical category of evidentiality, which expresses the source of information about the situation being described. In many languages of the world, such an indication is mandatory: this means that the speaker must indicate whether he observed a given event with his own eyes, heard about it from someone, judges it on the basis of indirect signs or logical reasoning, etc.; the most complex evidential systems are characteristic of Tibetan languages and a number of American Indian languages; somewhat simpler evidential systems are found in the languages of the Balkan area (Bulgarian, Albanian, Turkish), as well as in many languages of the Caucasus, Siberia and the Far East.