1 explain the syllabic structure in english

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17 American structuralism generally refers to the study of structural linguistics in North America from the 1920s to late 1950s. Franz Boas, Leonard Bloomfield and Edward Sapir were some prominent American linguists in this movement. Leonard Bloomfield led the development of structural linguistics in the US during the 1930s and 40s. This time period is, in fact, called the Bloomfieldian era. Bloomfield and his fellow linguistics mainly focused on forms of linguistics items and the way they were structured, instead of focusing on semantics.
In this era, linguists focused mostly on writing descriptive grammars of unwritten languages, especially the Native American languages which were dying out. IT involved collecting sets of utterances from native speakers and analysing the corpus of collected data by studying the syntactic and phonological patterns of the language, as far as possible without reference to meaning. Moreover, this method identified and classified the linguistics items based on their distribution within the corpus. In this analysis, linguists found that those native languages couldn’t be described with categories established by traditional linguists, which were based on European languages. It compelled the American linguists to do more advanced studies. Therefore, it is this focus on the Native American languages that actually formed American linguistics, differentiating it from other movements of linguistics structuralism.

Characteristics of American Structuralism

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  Began as an offshoot of anthropology
  
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  Influenced by behaviourist psychology
  
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  Focused on native American languages, which were dying out
  
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  Neglect of semantics
  
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  Attempted to develop a methodology to describe any corpus in terms of the distribution of its expression-elements relative to each other.
  

18 In the 1950s, Noam Chomsky introduced into linguistics the notion of a generative grammar, which has proved to be very influential. Now there are very many different types of generative grammar which can be conceived of, and Chomsky himself defined and discussed several quite different types in his early work. But, from the beginning, he himself favoured a particular type, to which he gave the name transformational grammar, or TG; TG has sometimes also been called transformational generative grammar.
Most types of generative grammar in which anybody has ever been interested can be usefully viewed as working like this: starting with nothing, the rules of the grammar build up the structure of a sentence piece by piece, adding something at each step, until the sentence structure is complete. Crucially, once something has been added to a sentence structure, it must remain: it cannot be changed, deleted or moved to a different location.
TG is hugely different. In TG, the structure of a sentence is first built up in the manner just described, using only context-free rules which are a simple type of rule widely used in other types of generative grammar. The structure which results is called the deep structure of the sentence. But, after this, some further rules apply. These rules are called transformations, and they are different in nature. Transformations have the power to change the structure which is already present in a number of ways: not only can they add new material to the structure (though only in the early versions), but they can also change material which is already present in various ways, they can move material to a different location, and they can even delete material from the structure altogether. When all the relevant transformations have finished applying, the resulting structure is the surface structure of the sentence. Because of the vast power of transformations, the surface structure may look extremely different from the deep structure.

19 grammatical structure?

In synthetic languages, such as for instance Russian, the gram­matical relations between words are expressed by means of inflec­tions: e.g. крыша дома.
In analytical languages, such as English, the grammatical rela­tions between words are expressed by means of form words, and word order: e.g. the roof of the house.
§ 2. Analytical forms are mostly proper to verbs. An analytical verb-form consists of one or more form words, which have no lexi­cal meaning and only express one or more of the grammatical categories of person, number, tense, aspect, voice, mood, and one notional word, generally an infinitive or a participle: e. g. He has come, I am reading. The analytical forms are:

1. 
   Tense and Aspect verb-forms (the Continuous form: I am writing, the Perfect form: I have written, the Perfect Continuous form: I have been writing, the Future Indefinite: I shall write, all the other forms of the Future; also the interrogative and the negative forms of the Present and Past Indefinite: Does he sing? He does noising).
   
2. 
   The Passive Voice: I was invited to the theatre.
   
3. 
   The analytical form of the Subjunctive Mood: I should go there if I had time.
   

+In all these analytical forms the form word is an auxiliary verb. (For detailed treatment see chapters on the verb.)

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   20 What principle are words grouped into the parts of speech according to?
   

The general definition of a part of speech: it is a lexical-grammatical word class which is characterized by a general abstract grammatical meaning, expressed in certain grammatical markers. Within a part of speech similar grammatical features are common to all words belonging to this class.
A part of speech is a mixed lexical-grammatical phenomenon, because:
1) Words are characterized by individual lexical meanings. 2) Each generalized class of words (noun/verb/adj., etc) has a unifying abstract gram. meaning, for ex.: noun – substance, verb – process, adjective – quality of substance, adverb – quality of process. 3) Some parts of speech are capable of representing gram. meaning in a set of formal exponents; for ex.: the plural of nouns is expressed with suffix –s (this feature is not universal in all languages).
PS are distinguished from one another by the number of words in each class. The greatest number of wds is found in the noun & verb. The N&V correspond to the subj.&pred. of the sent., they’re usually the center of predication.
Modern classification of parts of speech is traced back to ancient Greek. Later this classification was applied to Latin and thus it found its way in modern languages. The present day classification of parts of speech is severely criticized, when it’s applied to languages the structure of which is different to the structure of the Latin language. So the criticism is easily justified. On the other hand the traditional division of words into parts of speech seems quiet natural and easy to understand & remember from the logical point of view. So it’s not the classification itself that is wrong but it must be the principles of classification that should be criticized and reviewed.

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   21 What is grammatical meaning and grammatical form?
   

. The basic notions of Grammar are the grammatical meaning, the grammatical form and the grammatical category.
The grammatical meaning is a general, abstract meaning which embraces classes of words.
The grammatical meaning depends on the lexical meaning and is connected with objective reality indirectly, through the lexical meaning.
The grammatical meaning is relative, it is revealed in relations of word forms: speak — speaks.
The grammatical meaning is obligatory. Grammatical meaning must be expressed if the speaker wants to be understood.
The grammatical meaning must have a grammatical form of expression (inflexions, analytical forms, word-order, etc.). Compare the word forms walks, is writing. Both forms denote process, but only the second form expresses it grammatically.
The term, form _ may be used in a wide sense lo denote all means of expressing grammatical meanings. It may be also used in a narrow sense to denote means of .expressing a particular grammatical meaning (plural, number, present tense, etc.).
+Grammatical elements are unities of meaning and form, content and expression. In the language system there is no direct correspondence of meaning and form. Two or more units of the plane of content may correspond to one unit of the plane of expression (polysemy; homonymy). Two or more units of the plane of expression may correspond to one unit of the plane of content (synonymy).
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