Main notions of Grammar. Grammatical form

Grammatical form expresses grammatical meanings.

The form goes denotes present tense, 3rd person, singular number, indicative mood, active voice, etc.

These meanings are revealed in different oppositions: is going, goes, went, has gone.

But grammatical forms cannot express different meanings of the same category. So if a grammatical form has two or more meanings, they belong to different categories.

There are several types of form-building in English. The main subdivision of form-building types is into synthetical (simple synthetical) and analytical.

In a synthetical type a grammatical meaning is expressed within a word, and analytical (which is presented by two or more elements, besides these elements perform different functions) - type a grammatical meaning is expressed with the help of auxiliary words (plus suffixes).The synthetical types of form-building in English include affixation (reads, shown, books, theirs etc.), sound interchange (take - took, shine - shone) and suppletivity (go - went, be - was, good - better – best). The only productive type in the present-day English is affixation, but the other two types are no less important, if only because they occur in words which are most frequently used. Criteria of words being suppletive (A.I.Smirnitsky)

1. Words should be identical as to their lexical meaning;

2. They should have no parallel pairs;

3. Other words belonging to the same class should build up the same opposition without suppletivity

The analytical type of form-building occupies a very important place in the grammatical structure of English as the Language has evolutionized from being mainly synthetical to becoming more and more analytical, and analytical tendencies in the present day English are very strong. There exist the so-called half-analytical structures and the analytical tendencies find their reflection in many spheres of the Language.

Analytical form – a combination elements of which are written separately.

The analytical form(The functional element, the notional element)

Criteria of analytical grammatical forms (not to mix them up with free combinations of words)has come and he came

a) They function as one semantic unit

b) They perform the same syntactic role

Synthetic vs Analytical forms

Paradigms of words may consist of simple synthetic forms only as in boy - boys. A paradigm may embrace both: simple and analytical forms as in comes - has come. But pure analytical forms cannot form separate paradigms. The grammatical centre of any paradigm is always presented by simple synthetic forms.