ns that any given word under analysis was turned into a classified lexeme on the principle of its relation to grammatical change. In conditions of the primary acquisition of linguistic knowledge, and in connection with the study of a highly inflexional language this characteristic proved quite efficient. p align="justify"> Still, at the present stage of the development of linguistic science, syntactic characterisation of words that has been made possible after the exposition of their fundamental morphological properties, is far more important and universal from the point of view of the general classificational requirements.
This characterisation is more important, because it shows the distribution of words between different sets in accord with their functional destination. The role of morphology by this presentation is not underrated, rather it is further clarified from the point of view of exposing connections between the categorial composition of the word and its sentence-forming relevance. p align="justify"> This characterisation is more universal, because it is not specially destined for the inflexional aspect of language and hence is equally applicable to languages ​​of various morphological types.
On the material of Russian, the principles of syntactic approach to the classification of word stock were outlined in the works of A. M. Peshkovsky. The principles of syntactic (syntactico-distributional) classification of English words were worked out by L. Bloomfield and his followers Z. Harris and especially Ch. Fries. p align="justify"> The syntactico-distributional classification of words is based on the study of their combinability by means of substitution testing. The testing results in developing the standard model of four main "positions" of notional words in the English sentence: those of the noun (N), verb (V), adjective (A), adverb (D). Pronouns are included into the corresponding positional classes as their substitutes. Words standing outside the "positions" in the sentence are treated as function words of various syntactic values. p align="justify"> Here is how Ch. Fries presents his scheme of English word-classes [Fries]. p align="justify"> For his materials he chooses tape-recorded spontaneous conversations comprising about 250,000 word entries (50 hours of talk). The words isolated from this corpus are tested on the three typical sentences (that are isolated from the records, too), and used as substitution test-frames:
Frame A. The concert was good (always). p align="justify"> Frame B. The clerk remembered the tax (suddenly). p align="justify"> Frame C. The team went there. p align="justify"> The parenthesised positions are optional from the point of view of the structural completion of sentences.
As a result of successive substitution tests on the cited "frames" the following lists of positional words ("form-words", or "parts of speech") are established:
Class 1. (A) concert, coffee, taste, container, difference, etc. (B) clerk, husband, supervisor, etc.; Tax, food, coffee, etc. (C) team, husband, woman, etc. p align="justify"> Class 2. (A) was, seemed, became, etc. (B) remembered, wanted, saw, suggested, etc. (C) went, came, ran, ... lived, worked, etc.
Class 3. (A) good, large, necessary, foreign, new, empty, etc.Class 4. (A) there, here, always, then, sometimes, etc. p align="justify"> (B) clearly, sufficiently, especially, repeatedly, soon, etc.
(C) there, back, out, etc.; rapidly, eagerly, confidently, etc. All these words can fill in the positions of the frames
without affecting their general structural meaning (such as "thing and its quality at a given time" - the first frame; "actor - action - thing acted upon - characteristic of the action" - the second frame; "actor - action - direction of the action" - the third frame). Repeated interchanges in the substitutions of the primarily identified positional (ie notional) words in different collocations determine their morphological characteristics, ie characteristics referring them to various subclasses of the identified lexemic classes.
Functional words (function words) are exposed in the cited process of testing as being unable to fill in the positions of the frames without destroying their structural meaning. These words form limited groups totalling 154 units. p align="justify"> The identified groups of functional words can be distributed among the three main sets. The words of the first set are used as specifiers of notional words. Here belong determiners of nouns, modal verbs serving as specifiers of notional verbs, functional modifiers and intensifiers of adjectives and adverbs. The words of the second set pla...
