Languages define their grammatical rules in terms of various “situations and uses”. Among these for the English language are:
NUMBER – singular or plural
CASE – subjective or objective
TENSE – present, past, or future
VOICE – active or passive
MOOD – indicative or subjunctive
GENDER – masculine, feminine or neuter (not really that important in English, but included for an attempt at completeness)
I have three questions:
Is there a specific name for the group of terms in upper case above that describe what I have called “situations and uses”?
Are there any other terms like those in upper case that describe “situations and uses” in English? (For example, the term “perfect” fits in somehow with TENSE; I just don’t know if there is another main category to cover it, as in: TERM-I-DON’T-KNOW – perfect or “regular”.)
Are there any other terms used for other languages? (I know there can be other subcategories. For example, Latin has genitive and ablative, but these are still subcategories of CASE. I’m looking for other main categories.)
I’m not sure what you’re referring to as “perfect” in English - if you mean things like the pluperfect or future perfect, those are most certainly under the rubric of TENSE. (I could drone on and on about perfect tenses, thanks to some thinking I did about it for my dissertation, but I’ll spare you unless you really want to know.)
I can think of one: most Slavic languages also have ASPECT - perfective vs. imperfective. This is a verbal category that has to do with the type of action being described: actions happening one time, or very suddenly, or with a strongly defined beginning or end point (perfective), or continuous, habitual, ongoing, or where beginning or end points are irrelevant (imperfective).
I don’t know how things like ergativity fit into this, but that might be a kind of ASPECT too. Someone with more knowledge can answer that one better than I.
One more comment: GENDER certainly does have some importance to English, just not on the level of things like nouns agreeing w/adjectives (i.e. morphology). But whenever you need to use a pronoun, you do have to think about it a bit.
A grammatical category that often makes a big difference in how nouns and pronouns are treated by grammatical rules is animacy. More or less, an animate noun is one that refers to a human and an inanimate one is one that doesn’t refer to a human (although the distinction is really more about consciousness and nonconsciousness rather than about species). This doesn’t play much of a role in English.
Another one is degree, which is the category that defines the difference between the positive (“fast,” “importantly”), comparative (“faster,” “more importantly”), and superlative (“fastest,” “most importantly”) versions of adjectives and adverbs.
There’s a category which applies to entire sentences. I’m not sure what to call it. It’s often just called the kind or type of the sentence. This is whether the sentence is declarative, interrogative, imperative, or exclamatory (and some would also add performative).
When I was at school we always maintained a distinction between the case names in English (subjective, objective) and those in Latin and Greek (nominative, accusative, genitive etc).
Just to be clear. I am neither a grammarian nor a linguist, this is just some of the totally useless crap left in my head after 10 yrs. of a good catholic education. Amazing what sticks and what slips away.
BTW, they are called “declensions”. We were asked to "parse’ sentences and “decline” verbs. Hence the latin verb “to love”.
Technically, “gender” doesn’t just mean masculine, feminine, or neuter; some languages have dozens of genders, which simply means “type” to linguists. But most languages that we’re familiar with in the Western world have the three genders.
Hm, I always thought things like imperative or interrogative were just part of “mood”. Of course this is all argued over by legions of cranky linguists around the globe, I suspect. But I see declarative called a mood here, for example.
Good call on animacy and degree, btw.
If you’re talking about locating things within the context of time or place, that’s deixis. For example, some languages have robust distinctions between “this thing here” and “that thing there” and maybe also “that thing waaaay over there”.
Oh, and as for me forgetting “person”: :smack:
And on preview, gommsn I believe you are confusing a verb’s conjugation with the cases for noun declension!
Yes, and one of the most annoying (to me) things about popular discourse is the use of “gender” when one can just say “sex.” In fact, a few decades ago people just said “sex”–male or female, and no one blushed.
It doesn’t matter how long our finger nails grow, there’s always going to be some puritanism under them.
Right again, Anaptyxis. English has deixis in many ways. The verbs come vs. go, for example. And deixis also has an affective component. If you don’t like someone, you’ll say “That guy bothers me.” rather than “This guy bothers me.”
This page includes a few that haven’t been mentioned, such as:
Noun class: In some languages, including Chinese and Japanese, nouns belong to a class that determines which counter word is used in the plural; consider ‘fourteen head of cattle’, ‘3 pairs of pants’, then imagine there was a word like ‘head’ or ‘pair’ for every noun. Distinctions made on the basis of whether a noun is human, non-human but animate or inanimate also fall into this category.
Definiteness: A quality of articles: a vs. the.
Polarity: Affirmative vs. negative.
Transitivity: Intransitive vs. transitive; the number of objects a verb must take. Some verbs are ditransitive and require two objects (one direct, one indirect), as in ‘I put the book on the floor’.
The word has at least two meanings: one is a linguist-specific meaning, and the other is a mainstream meaning. While in linguistics it refers to “type,” in mainstream usage it refers to “sex.” No big deal.
Daniel
No, you’re not… but that’s a specific term referring to instances where grammatical categories are expressed by changing some part of a word itself, i.e. changing the endings on a Latin noun to express different grammatical roles for that noun depending on the utterance. Languages like English aren’t too fond of that kind of mucking around and tend to express grammatical categories at the level of syntax, i.e. moving words around, like “Man bites dog” versus “Dog bites man”.
So “inflection” is just one way to express grammatical categories.
And etmiller, when it comes to deixis, don’t forget “This discussion is keeping me from getting any work done today!”
So far we have the following grammatical categories:
NUMBER
CASE
TENSE
ASPECT
VOICE
MOOD
GENDER
PERSON
ANIMACY
DEGREE
DEIXIS
Gender (and maybe animacy) is really more like a part of something that may be called type or class for nouns (as Left Hand of Dorkness has already pointed out). This isn’t used much in English, it’s used in some languages to determine what classifier is used before a noun. These classes vary greatly, often being things like whether it’s a human, whether it’s liquid, whether it’s round, whether it’s thin, whether it’s alive, whether it’s a body part, whether it’s edible, whether it’s dangerous, etc.
Some languages, incidentally, have as many as four numbers: singular, dual, trial, and plural (for four or more).
I realize that, and I agree it’s no big deal. I also realize that language usage evolves with time. It just annoys me that our society often causes language to change for stupid reasons. Look at how many people have said “oxymoron” to mean “contradiction,” just to make themselves sound smarter. They did it so much they got it into the dictionary that way.
