The Underlying Grammar in a Language Course (with a special reference to Russian)

Abstract

The thesis describes and justifies a set of ideal syntactic wordclasses designed to facilitate the analysis of sentences of modern standard scientific and technical Russian by the setting up of chains of syntactic predictions designed to be derivable through a defined search procedure in a specially-prepared dictionary, which also contains appropriate instructions for translation into English of chains of a given structure (sentences of Russian). A set of such syntactic word-classes has been used as the basis of a textbook of scientific and technical Russian (a so-called ‘Integrated Dictionary'), which is described in the thesis. Its proposed syntactic word-classes are critically compared with the ideal set, and amendments to the textbook proposed. A number of traditional textbooks of scientific and technical Russian are also examined, with a view to deriving from them a set of wordclasses analogous to our proposed ideal set. On the basis of a comparison of the ideal set of syntactic wordclasses with those derived from the textbooks, it is concluded that a) the traditional textbooks do not,strictly speaking, constitute grammars of Russian, a deficiency which can be related to their underlying grammatical theory, and b) the present ‘Integrated Dictionary' amounts to an attempt to express in morpho-syntactic terms the information given in traditional courses, and fails to provide all the information necessary to achieve its declared aim of analysis through strings of syntactic predictions.