Grammar as a phenomenon – a subsystem of language as a linguistic discipline

2. Main grammatical notions. Grammatical meaning and grammatical form. Grammatical categories. Method of opposition

The basic notions of grammar are the grammatical meaning, the grammatical form and the grammatical category.

Grammatical meaning = the plane of content
Notional words, first of all verbs and nouns, possess some morphemic features expressing grammatical (morphological) meanings.
Gr. meaning:

• 
  abstract
  
• 
  general
  
• 
  indirect. (the gram. meaning depends on the lexical meaning and is connected with objective reality indirectly, through the lexical meaning).
  
• 
  obligatory (gram. meaning must be expressed if the speaker wants to be understood)Ex. Woggles uggled diggles (more than approx. 4 did smth in the past)
  
• 
  relative/ oppositional, it is revealed in relations of word forms: speak-speaks, dog -dogs
  

The gram. meaning must have a grammatical form of expression ( inflexions, analytical forms, word-order..) Compare the word forms walks, is writing. Both forms denote process, but only the second form expresses it grammatically.
Grammatical meanings are very abstract, very general. Therefore the grammatical form is not confined to an individual word, but unites a whole class of words, so that each word of the class expresses the corresponding grammatical meaning together with its individual, concrete semantics.
The grammatical form presents a division of the word on the principle of expressing a certain grammatical meaning.
Grammatical form = the plane of expression
Grammatical Morphological Form
= “forms”
= individual gr. forms – dog-dogs
Grammatical Syntactic Form
= distribution
The term form may be used in a wide sense to 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).
(то же самое,но по конспекту) Every gram. unit is a unity of gr. meaning (the plane of content) and gr. form ( the plane of expression)
BUT!
There is no direct correspondence between gr.meaning and gram. form
2 or more unit of the plane of expression may correspond to 1 unit of the plane of content ex. boys-children
allomorphs
gram.forms
2 or more units of the plane of content may correspond to 1 unit of the plane of expression ex. – s inflexion dogs, asks, greens