Файл: Базисные категории методики. Дидактические и методические принципы и содержание обучения иностранному языку в школе.docx

Важно также отметить, что при формулировании целей, нужно ответить на вопрос «что?», а при формулировании задач «что делать?». Например, цель – ознакомление с некоторыми популярными английскими журналами; задачи – учить читать публицистические тексты, учить просмотровому и поисковому чтению и т.д.

5. 
   Borrowings. (Waves of borrowings)
   

Borrowing is the second most important way of increasing the vocabulary stock. Native words are the most frequently used words. Native words are subdivided into two groups: Indo-European and Common Germanic.

The oldest layer of words in English are words met in Indo-European languages. A much larger group of native vocabulary are Common Germanic words (their equivalents are met in German, Norwegian, Dutch, Icelandic).

Native words have a great word-building capacity, they form a lot of phraseological units, they are mostly polysemantic.

More than two thirds of the English vocabulary are borrowings. Mostly they are words of Romanic origin (Latin, French, Italian, Spanish). Borrowed words are different from native ones by their phonetic structure, by their morphological structure and also by their grammatical forms. It is also characteristic of borrowings to be non-motivated semantically.

Cases when both form and meaning are borrowed into the language are called borrowings or loans proper. A language may borrow the form and the meaning of a word, as it happened with names of material objects of culture (butter, street etc borrowed from Latin).

We speak about semantic borrowings when a new meaning of the unit existing in the language is borrowed: there are semantic borrowngs between Scandinavian and English, such as the meaning “to live” for the word to dwell which in Old English had the meaning “to wander”.

There are also cases when the structure of the word or set expression is borrowed, but the actual words and expressions are coined from the material existing in the language. These are called loan translations – wonder child (Wunderkind).

Morphemic borrowings are borrowings of affixes which occur in the language when many words with identical affixes are borrowed from one language into another. As the result, the morphemic structure of borrowed words becomes familiar to the people speaking the borrowing language: goddess (native root + Romanic suffix -ess), uneatable (English prefix un- + English root + Romanic suffix -able).

From the formal, or structural point of view, some of the borrowed words are clearly perceived as foreign. It may show in the graphic or sound form: café, soprano etc. In other cases, borrowed words undergo phonetic and morphological changes and get assimilated to the system of the recipient language. This happened, for example, to the French word alouer (сдавать в наем) that turned into allow – позволять.

From the semantic point of view we can differentiate

• 
  non-assimilated words (sometimes called barbarisms) – words denoting realia of another country
  
• 
  partially assimilated words – words the meanings of which are assimilated by the recipient language, but the usage of which is restricted by a specific sphere – terms and bookish words
  
• 
  fully assimilated words – those which were at some moment borrowed from another language but have lost all signs of foreign origin and are perceived as native.
  

Most borrowings come into English from these sources:

a) Scandinavian borrowings. bull, cake, egg, knife; such adjectives as flat, ill, happy; such verbs as call, die, guess; pronouns and connective words same, both, though; pronominal forms they, them, their;

b) Romanic borrowings (Latin and Greek). They appeared in English during the Middle English period due to the Great Revival of Learning: memorandum, maximum, veto;

c) French borrowings: words relating to government – administer, empire; words relating to military affairs: soldier, battle; words relating to jurisprudence: advocate, barrister; words relating to fashion: luxary, coat; words relating to jewelry: emerald, pearl; words relating to food and cooking: dinner, appetite

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Also many borrowings came into English from Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch; Russian.

Words of identical origin that occur in several languages as a result of simultaneous or successive borrowings from one ultimate source are called international words. International words play an especially important part in different terminological systems including the vocabulary of science, industry and art. The origin of this vocabulary reflects the history of world culture.

Though there are many exceptions we can say that in terminology and learned words the foreign element (i.e. borrowed words) dominate the native. And the informal strata of the language, especially slang and dialect, abound in native words. Compare the expressive and stylistic value of the French and the English words in such synonymic pairs as to begin – to commence, to wish – to desire, happiness – felicity,

Borrowing as a means of replenishing the vocabulary of present-day English is of much lesser importance and is active mainly in the field of scientific terminology. It should be noted that many terms are often made up of borrowed morphemes, mostly morphemes from classical languages. The present-day English vocabulary, especially its terminological layers, is constantly enriched by words made up of morphemes of Latin and Greek origin (protein, oscilloscope, paralinguistic). But though these words consist of borrowed morphemes they cannot be regarded as true borrowings because these words did not exist either in the Greek or in the Latin word-stock. All of them are actually formed according to patterns of English word-formation.

5. 
   Define and exemplify the following terms: paradigm, lexeme,
   

grammatical category
In the language system each unit is included into a set of connections based on different properties. For example, the word-forms child, children, child’s, children’s have the same lexical meaning, so they constitute a lexeme. The grammatical meaning of the word runs, expressed by the suffix –s, unites this word with walks, stands, sleeps, skates, lives and a great many other words into a group we shall call a grammeme.

From the previous examples it is clear that a word like runs containing a lexical and a grammatical morpheme is at the same time a member of a certain lexeme and of a certain grammeme. In a lexeme the lexical morpheme may be regarded as invariable (at least in content) and the grammatical morphemes as variables. In a grammeme, on the contrary, the grammatical morpheme is invariable and the lexical morphemes are variables. As we see, each word of a lexeme represents a certain grammeme, and each word of a grammeme represents a certain lexeme,

The system of all grammatical forms (grammemes) of all lexemes of a given class constitute a paradigm (e.g. парадигма множественного числа существительного).

The grammatical meaning (of plurality, of the past tense, of the passive voice) is a very general abstract meaning. It is not confined to an individual word. It is expressed by special grammatical forms. (For example, boys, children, phenomena, teeth, mice). The grammatical meaning depends on the lexical meaning and is connected with objective reality in most cases indirectly, that is why we may say that the grammatical meaning is relative; it is revealed by at least two forms opposed to one another.

Speak – speaks (third person singular).

Speak – spoke (past indefinite tense)

The grammatical meaning is obligatory, it must be expressed in speech if the speaker wants to be understood properly. The grammatical meaning must have a form of expression (inflexions, analytical form, word order, intonation). Let’s compare the word-forms walks – is walking. Both denote process, but only the second form expresses it grammatically, with the help of the continuous tense.

The term ‘form’ may be used in a wide sense to denote all means of expressing grammatical meaning, or in a narrow sense – to denote the means of expressing a particular grammatical meaning (plural number, present tense, possessive case). Grammatical forms may play a vital role in our ability to lend variety to speech, to give "colour" to the subject or evaluate it and to convey the information more emotionally. (You are being naughty today.)

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A lexeme is a unit of lexical meaning that exists regardless of the number of inflectional endings it may have or the number of words it may contain. It is a basic unit of meaning, and the headwords of a dictionary are all lexemes. Put more technically, a lexeme is an abstract unit of morphological analysis in linguistics, that roughly corresponds to a set of forms taken by a single word. For example, in the terminology language, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, conventionally written as run. A related concept is the lemma (or citation form), which is a particular form of a lexeme that is chosen by convention to represent a canonical form of a lexeme. Lemmas, being a subset of lexemes, are likewise used in dictionaries as the headwords, and other forms of a lexeme are often listed later in the entry if they are not common conjugations of that word. A lexeme belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a certain meaning (semantic value), and in inflecting languages, has a corresponding inflectional paradigm; that is, a lexeme in many languages will have many different forms. For example, the lexeme run has a present third person singular form runs, a present non-third-person singular form run (which also functions as the past participle and non-finite form), a past form ran, and a present participle running. (It does not include runner, runners, runnable, etc.) The use of the forms of a lexeme is governed by rules of grammar; in the case of English verbs such as run, these include subject-verb agreement and compound tense rules, which determine which form of a verb can be used in a given sentence.

A lexicon consists of lexemes.

In many formal theories of language, lexemes have subcategorization frames to account for the number and types of complements. They occur within sentences and other syntactic structures.

The notion of a lexeme is very central to morphology, and thus, many other notions can be defined in terms of it. For example, the difference between inflection and derivation can be stated in terms of lexemes:

Inflectional rules relate a lexeme to its forms.

Derivational rules relate a lexeme to another lexeme.

A grammatical category is a property of items within the grammar of a language; it has a number of possible values (sometimes called grammemes), which are normally mutually exclusive within a given category. Examples of frequently encountered grammatical categories include tense (which may take values such as present, past, etc.), number (with values such as singular, plural, and sometimes dual, trial and paucal) and gender (with values such as masculine, feminine and neuter).

Although terminology is not always consistent, a distinction should be made between these grammatical categories (tense, number, etc.) and lexical categories, which are closely synonymous with the traditional parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, etc.), or more generally syntactic categories. Grammatical categories are also referred to as (grammatical) features.

The name given to a grammatical category (as an uncountable noun) is generally also used (as a countable noun) to denote any of the possible values for that category. For example, the values available in a given language for the category "tense" are called "tenses", the values available for the category "gender" are called "genders", and so on.

A phonological manifestation of a category value (for example, a word ending those marks plurality on a noun) is sometimes called an exponent.

5. 
   Define and exemplify the modality of assessment and the modality of irreality
   

In grammar and semantics, modality refers to linguistic devices that indicate the degree to which an observation is possible, probable, likely, certain, permitted, or prohibited. In English, these notions are commonly (though not exclusively) expressed by modal auxiliaries, sometimes combined with not.

Martin J. Endley suggests that “the simplest way to explain modality is to say that it has to do with the stance the speaker adopts toward some situation expressed in an utterance”.

Modality reflects the speaker’s attitude toward the situation being described. (Linguistic Perspectives on English Grammar, 2010).

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“Modality is concerned with the speaker’s assessment of, or attitude towards, the potentiality of a state of affairs. Modality, therefore, relates to different worlds. Assessments of potentiality (possibility), likelihood or necessity of situations and events, as in You must be right, relate to the world of knowledge and reasoning. This type of modality is known as epistemic modality.

EXAMPLES: It can be chilly here at night. You must be Dr. Livingstone. You might have left your coat at the pub. You must be tired; she can’t be on holiday, it might rain.

The subcategories of epistemic modality are reality and irreality (factuality – non-factuality), irreality on its part being represented by possibility, which may also be connected with the probability of realization, impossibility (counterfactuality) and necessity.

Example: A mother may imagine a counterfactual situation as in: I wish the baby was bigger – the status of irreality.

I would have helped you if you had asked me to. (you didn't ask me).

I wouldn't do that if I were you. (I am not you).

It would be nice to live by the sea. (I don't live by the sea).

5. 
   Discuss the category of number in terms of the following oppositions:
   

discrete vs. non-discrete objects, collective vs. singulative meanings,

and regular vs. irregular plural forms
There are different approaches to defining the category of number. Thus, some scholars believe that the category of number in English is restricted in its realization because of the dependent implicit grammatical meaning of countableness / uncountableness. The category of number is realized only within subclass of countable nouns, i.e., nouns having numeric (discrete) structure. Uncountable nouns have no category of number, for they have quantitative (indiscrete) structure. Two classes of uncountables can be distinguished: singularia tantum (only singular) and pluralia tantum (only plural). M. Blokh, however, does not exclude the singularia tantum subclass from the category of number. He calls such forms absolute singular forms comparable to the ‘common’ singular of countable nouns.

In Indo-European languages there are lots of nouns that don’t fit into the traditional definition of the category based on the notion of quantity. A word can denote one object, but it has the plural form. Or a noun can denote more than one thing, but its form is singular. There is a definition of the category of number that overcomes this inconsistency. It was worked out by prof. Isachenko. According to him, the category of number denotes marked and unmarked discreteness (not quantity). A word in a singular form denotes unmarked discreteness whether it is a book, or a sheep, or sheep. If an object is perceived as a discrete thing, it has the form of the plural number. Thus, trousers and books are perceived as discrete object whereas a flock of sheep is seen as a whole. This definition is powerful because it covers nearly all nouns while the traditional definition excludes many words.

The grammatical meaning of number may not coincide with the notional quantity: the noun in the singular does not necessarily denote one object while the plural form may be used to denote one object consisting of several parts. The singular form may denote:

• 
  oneness (individual separate object – a cat);
  
• 
  generalization (the meaning of the whole class – The cat is a domestic animal);
  
• 
  indiscreteness (uncountableness - money, milk).
  

The plural form may denote:

• 
  the existence of several objects (cats);
  
• 
  the inner discreteness (pluralia tantum – jeans).
  

To sum it up, all nouns may be subdivided into three groups:

The nouns in which the opposition of explicit discreteness / indiscreteness is expressed: cat – cats;

The nouns in which this opposition is not expressed explicitly but is revealed by syntactical and lexical correlation in the context. There are two groups here:

1. 
   Singularia tantum. It covers different groups of nouns: proper names, abstract nouns, material nouns, collective nouns;
   
2. 
   Pluralia tantum. It covers the names of objects consisting of several parts (jeans), names of sciences (mathematics), names of diseases, games, etc.
   

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