Contents: introduction

Basic grammatical concepts

By grammatical forms we understand variations of a word having the same lexical meaning purpose differing grammatically (e.g. child, child's children, children's; teaches, taught, teaching).
Meaning expressed by a grammatical form is called grammatical meaning. Each notional word is a unity of the two types of meaning – lexical and grammatical. Lexical meaning is of individual character. It is common in a lot of words, which have different lexical meanings (e.g. tables, chairs, men, women, events; played, lived, wrote, ran, went).
Grammatical meaning is always expressed by a grammatical marker and it is obligatory.
Grammatical meanings are revealed in opposition.
Oppositions are peers of grammatical forms opposed to each other in some way” (B. Ilysh).
A two-member opposition is called binary. Of the two members of an opposition one is called marked and the other one is unmarked. For example, in the opposition “cat//cats” “cats” is the marked member. The meaning of the marked member is quite definite, whereas the meaning of the unmarked one is less definite and even wave.
Binary oppositions are typical of the English language. Year opposition may consist of more than two members. (e.g. the tense opposition: studies – studied – will study).
The general meaning of two or more homogeneous grammatical meanings opposed to each other, makes up a grammatical category. E. g. the general meaning of singular and plural makes up the grammatical category of number; future tense makes up the grammatical category of tense.
There are two conditions for existing has grammatical category:
Grammatical categories may not coincide in different languages. For example, in Russian and Ukrainian there exists the grammatical category of animateness/ inanimateness, which does not exist in English; in English there exists the grammatical category of definiteness/indefiniteness, which does not exist in Russian and Ukrainian.
Concept of grammatical structure and grammatical meaning
It is well known that Penny Ur [20] reveals grammatical structure as a specific example of grammar. An example of a grammatical structure is: past tense, comparison of adjectives, noun suffixes (past tense, degrees of comparison of adjectives, plural nouns), etc. Of course, not all languages have the same structure: the English verb has aspects such as the progressive: (she is going) that many other languages do not have; German, for example, has masculine, feminine, and neuter genders that are not found in English. All these differences cause a lot of problems for students, even if you know the students' mother tongue well, it is very difficult to predict how serious these problems will be. Sometimes structures that seem strange at first glance are surprisingly easy to master.
Most foreign language textbooks do not focus on learning grammatical meaning, but only on the correctness of grammatical structure. For example, it is necessary not only to know and understand the tenses of verbs, but also to know what difference in meaning is formed when using the same tense in different situations. Foreign language students often have difficulty learning the grammatical meaning of certain grammatical structures.
Learning the meaning of grammatical structures is very difficult.