Semantics and Grammar - verbal and nominal categories

Tense
Three basic temporal divisions: X, Y, Z
- can be treated in a number of different ways
o a three-way division between past, present and future
o a two-way distinction: either between past and non-past or (more rarely) future and non-
future
Languages with bipartite systems have other means of indicating distinctions within the non-past or
non-future categories.
No language is recorded as having a single tense covering both past and future.
Many languages express gradations within the past or future.
English tense system: contrast between the simple past or preterite tense (a), and the present
perfect (b):
a. We saw the Queen.
b. We have seen the Queen.
The choice between preterite and present perfect construes the implications of the event in different
ways.
Most events can be described in either way.
The contrast between perfective and imperfective is independent of the actual duration of the event
in question.
Events that lasted a long time can often be described in perfective aspect, whereas instantaneous
(‘punctual’) events may also be presented imperfectively (although this is rarer):
a. Evolution created the eye over many millennia.
b. I was turning the key in the lock when I heard a funny noise in the room
Aspectual contrasts play an important role in discourse, especially in narrative.
The choice of an imperfective or perfective form influences the interpretation of the
chronological relations between the different actions reported in a text.
A major difference between tense and aspect is that tense is deictic and aspect isn’t.
Since the time of utterance changes from one utterance to the next, the actual values of past, present
and future themselves change.
The particular time reference of any tense therefore has to be anchored deictically in the moment of
utterance.
Aspect, by contrast, doesn’t depend like tense on any external, deictic connection to the speech
situation; it only makes reference to the internal temporal properties of the event.
Gender
A system of gender - found in many languages, such as German, French, or Italian, as well as in an
earlier stage of English - grammatical gender.
Grammatical gender appears to be arbitrary, not related to the sex of the object denoted.
Indo-European languages usually distinguish three genders - masculine, feminine, and neuter -
which are supposed to reflect the semantic concepts of animacy/inanimacy and sex.
Sex is not the only 'natural' semantic basis for classification - it may be shape, texture, colour,
edibility - in short, any set of 'natural' properties.
- nothing about the morphological form of nouns such as boy and girl which would indicate that
they are masculine or feminine gender.
- gender is indicated by the cooccurrence of relevant pronouns
- gender is a covert category of the noun
Gender may also be expressed overtly on the English noun in a number of limited ways:
- Derivational suffixes
- Compounds
- Different forms in fem/masc/common gender
None of these means is systematic.
It is significant that the feminine is always derived from the masculine.
It is typical for the masculine form to double as the common gender form, e.g. dog
The marked use of the feminine gender with ships, cars, countries, fortune, art, music, and nature
in Present-day English is sometimes considered a remnant of grammatical gender.
Isn’t she a beauty? (referring to a car or a ship)
Every country must defend her sovereignty.
The use of neuter gender with babies or callers is an expediency used when the gender is
unknown.
What a cute baby. What’s its name?
The lack of a common gender for the 3rd person singular has long been a source of difficulty in
English.
Traditionally, the masculine form has been used for the generic. Forms such as his or her,
his/her, s/he are newer attempts to correct this deficiency.
e.g. Every child should put on his or her coat.
A. Lexical means of indicating gender:
1. Different words:
boy / girl drake/ duck brother / sister husband / wife
Note: The opposition animate-inanimate is reflected in such pairs as:
sheep-mutton, pig-pork, cow/ox-beef, calf-veal, hen/cock/chicken-chicken
2. Composition
- with words like: he-she, man-woman/maid, boy-girl, male-female, dog-bitch, cock-hen,
tom-tib/tabby (which can be looked upon as specialized free morphemes): policeman, policewoman;
- free morphemes which mark the feature [+young}: calf (whale/elephant), cub (bear/lion cub), pup
(dog/fox/wolf pup);
3. Derivation -
-ess: abbot-abbess,
-ine: hero-heroine,
-ix: administrator-administratrix
-a: Czar-czarina,
-e/-enne: fiancé-fiancée,
-ette/-euse: usher-usherette,
Note: Special cases: widow-widower; bride-bridegroom
Deviations from the Normative Patterns:
A. in colloquial, informal (everyday) contexts (governed by intimacy);
B. in literary language.
A. non-human entities are personified, while human entities are denied their human status;
Personification (Upgradiong):
- ship, steamer, boat, engine, car, balloon, airplane - she
- pipe, ball, pipe, furnace - he
- (names of plants) - she
Compare:
(in the family) Yeah, I finally fixed her up. Boy, she was a mess. Her lock was busted.
 (to the boss) I took care of the door leading to the stockroom. It wasn't much. Its lock wasn't
working properly.)
Downgrading (denying an entity's inherent or attributed human status):
A:‘Have you met Sarah’s new boyfriend?’
B:‘Oh, I wonder where she found it.’
Some atypical uses of ‘she’.
- in some varieties of English, the third person feminine pronoun in weather expressions (‘she’s
raining’), and in some idiomatic expressions such as ‘she’s a toughie’ (i.e. ‘it’s a tough problem’)
- she stands for an inanimate object is that of boats. When given a name boats acquire another
status.
Literary Style (Names of abstract nouns are referred to as he or she):
- names of countries, cities - f.: Paris was herself again.
- names of rivers - m. “But ol’ man river,/ He jes’ keeps rollin’ along!”
- abstractions - wisdom, crime, science, life, nature, fate, liberty, church, music f.: I love wisdom
more than she loves me.
- names of celestial bodies; Mars, Jupiter, sun - m; Venus, moon f.
- time, year, death - m. Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade… (Sonnet 18)
- the months, winds - f.
Countability
Philosophers' approach: -bounded vs. continuous entities in the dimension of space and/or time
the relation between the whole and its parts is defined in two properties:
-subdivisibility (versus anti-subdivisibility)
-additivity (versus anti-additivity)
Semantically, mass nouns have undivided reference; they have the properties called subdivisibility
and additivity.
The syntactic characteristic of mass terms reflect their semantic ones:
- they have mass quantifiers; they cannot take the indefinite article a/an or the cardinals;
- they trigger singular agreement with the verb and the singular anaphoric pronoun it;
- they do not have plural form;
- in point of their morphological structure, morphologically complex nouns that contain in
their structure the suffixes -ware, -ness, -ity, -hood are, generally, mass nouns.
Count nouns
- designate entities that are bounded in space, i.e. they are characterised by a certain special shape.
Countable nouns like boy, rabbit, flower, house are syntactically distinguished by the following
criteria:
- they take count quantifiers (many, few, each, every)
- they are individuated by the definite article a/an;
- they co-occur with cardinal numerals
- have a plural form
Countable nouns used in the plural trigger plural agreement with the verb and plural anaphoric
pronouns.
Number
The category of number - the grammatical expression of a generalizing and conceptualizing
process.
- connected with the logical category of plurality and with the notion of countability = inherent in
the lexical structure of all human language and cognition => that is, it is a semantic universal
category.
Countability
o uncountable nouns
o countable and uncountable nouns (collective)
o countable nouns
Number & concord
- a syntactic problem
- definition: the relationship between two grammatical elements such that if one of them contains
a particular feature (eg plurality) then the other also has to have that feature
Types of concord:
- Subject-Verb Concord grammatical
notional
proximity principle (attraction)