Лекции по теоретической грамматике английского языка. Тивьяева И.В. - 17 стр.

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position is that of good. Words that can substitute for good are Class 3 words. The

last position is that of there; words that can fill this position are called Class 4

words. According to the scholar, these four parts of speech contain about 67 per

cent of the total instances of the vocabulary. He also distinguishes 15 groups of

function words set up by the same process of substitution but on different patterns.

These function words (numbering 154 in all) make up a third of the recorded

material. Charles Fries does not use the traditional terminology. To understand his

function words better, we shall use, where possible, their traditional names: Group

A words (determiners); Group B (modal verbs); Group C (the negative particle

“not”); Group D (adverbs of degree); Group E (coordinating

conjunctions); Group F (prepositions); Group G (the auxiliary verb “to”); Group H

(the introductory “there”); Group I (interrogative pronouns and adverbs); Group J

(subordinating conjunctions); Group K (interjections); Group L (the words “yes”

and “no”); Group M (the so-called attention-giving signals: look, say, listen);

Group N (the word “please”); Group O (the forms “let us”, “lets” in request

sentences).

It is obvious that in classifying words into word-classes Charles Fries in fact

used the principle of function, or combinability (the position of a word in the

sentence is the syntactic function of word). Being a structuralist, he would not

speak of function: function is meaning while position is not. His classification is

not beyond criticism. First, not all relevant positions were tested. Class 3 words are

said to be used in the position of good (Frame A). But the most typical position of

these words is before Class l words. If this position had been used by the scholar,

such words as woolen, wooden, golden, etc. (i.e. relative adjectives) would have

found their place in the classification. But if he had done it, the classification

would have collapsed, for their position can be filled by other word-classes: nouns,

numerals, pronouns. Second, his functional classes are very much ‘splintered’, i.e.

broken into small groups. This is good for practice but bad for theory, for

theoretical grammar is more interested in uniting linguistic facts than in separating

them. Third, being deprived of meaning, his word-classes are “faceless”, i.e. they