Основы теоретической грамматики английского языка

CORRELATION BETWEEN VARIOUS MEANS OF FORM-BUILDING IN ENGLISH 
Analytical forms are much more typical of ME. Synthetic form-building means are few 
in number but widely used. Some grammatical suffixes are very productive.Analytical forms 
comprise synthetic forms. Although sound interchange is non-productive it is extensively used 
through the paradigm of the irregular verbs. Though suppletive forms are found through the 
paradigm of very few words they are very frequently used words. 
Middle English is not a purely analytical language, it is mainly analytical. Espersen 
mentioned that “English is an ideal language. Analytical languages reflect a more developed 
mentality.
Lecture 3.
The parts of speech problem. Word classes.
The term PART OF SPEECH was introduced long ago and is considered conventional. 
There are three principles of the classification: semantic, formal, functional. 
In many grammar schools the semantic principle is employed. This principle is based on 
universal forms of human thought which are reflected in three main categorial meanings of 
words: 
Substance (предметность) 

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Process (процессуальность) 
Property (качество, свойство) 
But it doesn’t always work, for it is hard to define the category of meaning of such words 
as WHITENESS, ACTION etc. 
Another point of view is that only the form should serve as a criterion of the 
classification of the part of speech. This principle is called “the formal criterion”. It was widely 
used by H. Sweet and others. They singled out the classes of declinable and indeclinable words. 
To the class of indeclinable words belong: THE, FOR, AS, ENOUGH, MUST. But this criterion 
is unreliable because they include MUST in the group. For MUST functions as many other 
verbs: SHALL > MUST (MUST WE GO?; SHALL WE GO?). 
Some linguists representing this approach define parts of speech as morphological 
classes. They are words of similar paradigm of word-forms (Fortunatov). 
This definition cannot be applied to the languages like Chinese where morphological 
system is non-existent or poorly-developed 
Reformatsky puts it that “parts of speech are grammatical word-classes. In singling out 
parts of speech they take into consideration their morphological and syntactical property. This 
particular approach is the boarder-line case between the second and the third approaches. 
Only the function of a word should be taken into consideration as a criterion for the part-
of-speech classification. It is called “the functional criterion”. The champions of this approach 
are Revzina, Revzin, Peshkovsky, Bloomfield. 
Charles Fries puts it: “The words that occupy the same sets of in English sentences must 
belong to the same class of words.” It is based on the combinability of words and the method 
used by Charles Fries is called SUBSTITUTION TESTING. It resulted four main positions of 
notional words. Accordingly all notional words are grouped into 4 classes: 
-of nouns 
-of verbs 
-of adjectives 
-of adverbs 
Pronouns were included into the corresponding classes as their substitutes. The number 
of functional words is 154 and they fall into 15 groups or into 3 sets.