Particles are subject to heated disputes in linguistics, since their inter­pretation depends on linguistic traditions as well as on an individual author. For example, Western scholars do not, as a rule, mention particles as a part of speech; in their classifications, these words are referred to adverbs, pro­nouns, and conjunctions. Thus, British and American grammarians […]

Conjunctions are functional words that connect separate words, word combinations, clauses or sentences and in doing so mark the relations of coordination and subordinatioh.jConsequently, the grammatical meaning of conjunctions is similar to that of prepositions: conjunctions mark grammati­cal relations but these relations are even more abstract than those indicated by prepositions. Conjunctions form a part […]

Defining the preposition, linguists usually point out three main proper­ties: 1) the preposition is a functional part of speech, i.e. a preposition cannot perform an independent syntactic function; 2) the preposition is a word ex­pressing subordinate relations between lexical parts of speech; 3) the preposition is a word with an obligatory pre-nounal position: it may […]

Article: Grammatical meaning – Part 1 Thus, the article should obviously be regarded as a phenomenon that can­not be fully referred either to morphology or to syntax. On the one hand, it is a part-of-speech marker of the noun, which makes it close to the morpheme. On the other hand, the article is a function-word […]

The article presents many difficulties to linguists. The problem of its grammatical meaning and its place in the language system is one of the most complicated in English grammar. Firstly, it is not quite clear whether the article should be treated as a separate word and what exactly its relation to the noun is. Secondly, […]

The interjection is a grammatically unchangeable part of speech that ex­presses human emotions, states of mood and volition without naming them. The latter property makes it possible for some scholars to contrast interjec­tions with so-called “intellectual words”. Interjections differ from all other parts of speech in their origin, specific nomination, phonetic structure as well as […]

It might be expected that, since the adverb is a traditional part of speech, all debates over its status and properties are over. It is far from the truth. Ap­proaches to the adverb have been numerous: the adverb has undergone func­tional-semantic analysis, syntactic analysis, the correlation of its grammatical and lexical meanings has also been […]

Pronouns are characterized by an extremely generalizing meaning: they point out objects, entities, abstract notions and their qualities without nam­ing them. This generalizing part of speech is actualized contextually, and is deprived of any meaning outside a particular context. In other words, pro­nouns never name an object or its quality, pronouns only point them out […]

The verb is a part of speech that conveys a grammatical meaning of an action, i.e. of a dynamic quality developing in time. Here, the grammatical meaning of an action is stretched: it is understood not only as “action” proper but also as a state or a statement of existence of an object, or as […]

The noun as a part of speech has the categorical meaning of “substance” or “thingness”. “Thingness” is a grammatical meaning that permits names of abstract notions, actions, and qualities to function in the same way with names of objects and living beings. Nouns may be derived from verbs and adjectives by various derivational means and […]