Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка. Тивьяева И.В. - 16 стр.

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The Principles of Classification as Used by Structural Descriptive

Grammarians

The traditional classification of words into parts of speech was rejected by

structural grammarians who bitterly criticized it from two points. First, in their

opinion, traditional grammar relies heavily on the most subjective element in

language, meaning. The other is that it uses different criteria of classification: it

distinguishes the noun, the verb and the interjection on the basis of meaning; the

adjective, the adverb, the pronoun, and the conjunction, on the basis of function,

and the preposition, partly on function and partly on form.

One of the noted representatives of American structuralism, Charles Fries

(1956), rejected the traditional principle of classification of words into parts of

speech replacing it with the methods of distributional analysis and substitution.

Words that exhibit the same distribution (which is the set of contexts, i.e.

immediate linguistic environments, in which a word can appear) belong to the

same class. Roughly speaking, the distribution of a word is the position of a word

in the sentence. To classify the words of English, Charles Fries used three

sentences called substitution frames. He thought that the positions, or the slots, in

the sentences were sufficient for the purpose of the classification of all the words

of the English language.

Frame A

The concert was good.

Frame B

The clerk remembered the tax.

Frame C

The team went there.

The position discussed first is that of the word concert. Words that can

substitute for concert (e.g. food, coffee, taste, etc.) are Class 1 words. The same

holds good for words that can substitute for clerk, tax and team – these are typical

positions of Class 1 words. The next important position is that of was, remembered

and went; words that can substitute for them are called Class 2 words. The next