Exam Questions

The subject and aims of theoretical grammar as opposed to practical grammar.
 * 1) Theoretical grammar as a branch of linguistics. Grammar and other branches, their interrelations.
 * 2) Word as a main unit of morphology. Lexical and grammatical aspects of the word. Types of grammatical meanings.
 * 3) The historic development of English grammatical studies.
 * 4) The grammatical structure of the English language.
 * 5) Systemic relations in language. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations.
 * 6) Morphology and syntax as two main parts of grammar.
 * 7) Language as a system and structure. Language levels. Linguistic units and their peculiarities.
 * 8) Grammatical (morphological) categories. The notion of opposition as the basis of grammatical categories. Oppositional analysis. Types of oppositions.
 * 9) Grammatical categories in communication. Reduction of grammatical opposition.
 * 10) Parts of speech. Different approaches to the classification of parts of speech.
 * 11) Criteria for establishing parts of speech: semantic, formal and functional. Notional and functional parts of speech.
 * 12) The noun as a part of speech. Morphological, semantic and syntactic properties of the noun.
 * 13) Grammatically relevant classes of nouns.
 * 14) The category of number. Formal and functional features of the number category. The problem of number in different subclasses of nouns.
 * 15) The category of case. The evolution of theoretical interpretations of the category of case in English.
 * 16) The category of noun determination: oppositional and situational approaches. The linguistic status of article. The problem of the zero article.
 * 17) The verb as a part of speech. Grammatically relevant subclasses of verbs (transitive/intransitive, terminative/nonterminative).
 * 18) Syntagmatic properties of verbs: valency, combinability, adjunct, complement, supplement.
 * 19) Finite and non-finite forms of the verb. The category of finitude. Grammatical status of verbids, their grammatical categories and syntactic complexes.
 * 20) The verbal categories of person and number.
 * 21) The category of tense in English. Tense oppositions. Absolute and relative tense meanings of English tense-forms.
 * 22) The category of aspect. Aspect opposition in English. Lexical aspect in English and its difference from its Russian counterpart.
 * 23) The nature of Perfect forms. Opposition within this category, its name and realization in finite and non-finite forms.
 * 24) The category of voice. Voice opposition. The number of voices in English. Peculiarities of English Passive voice as compared with Russian.
 * 25) The category of mood. The problem of mood opposition. Mood and modality.
 * 26) The problem of the number of the Subjunctive Moods, their forms and uses.
 * 27) General description of the adjective as a part of speech. Subclasses of the adjective and their relation to the category of comparison.
 * 28) Grammatical category of comparison: controversy over types and number of forms; the elative comparison
 * 29) Prepositions and conjunctions as parts of speech and their semantic types.
 * 30) Function words in Modern English.
 * 31) Syntax as a part of grammar. Kinds of syntactic theories.
 * 32) Modern approaches to the language study: textlinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis.
 * 33) Basic syntactic notions: syntactic units, syntactic relations, syntactic connections.
 * 34) General characteristics of the word-group.
 * 35) Nominal word combinations. Noun-phrases with pre-posed and post-posed adjuncts.
 * 36) Verbal word combinations. Types of verbal complements.
 * 37) Predication. Primary and secondary predication. Predicative word combinations.
 * 38) The sentence. Structural and semantic characteristics of the sentence. Different approaches to the study of the sentence.
 * 39) Sentence - proposition - utterance - speech act.
 * 40) The structural types of sentences.
 * 41) The simple sentence. Principal, secondary and detached parts of the sentence.
 * 42) The paradigm of a simple sentence. Kernel and derived sentences.
 * 43) The utterance. Informative structure of the utterance. The theme and the rheme.
 * 44) The utterance. Communicative and pragmatic types of utterances.
 * 45) The complex sentence as a polypredicative construction. Types of subordinate clauses.
 * 46) Text as a syntactic unit. Coherence, cohesion and deixis as the main features of the text.