Nataliia G. Moiseienko
Candidate of Science in Philology, Associate Professor
at the Chair of English Grammar
Odessa National I. I. Mechnikov University,
Odessa, Ukraine
e-mail:natalymoiswx@gmail.com
ORCID ID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-3896-3668
DOI: https://doi.org/10.24195/2616-5317-2026-42.16
SUMMARY
This article deals with the definition of the grammatical status of the phrase a lot of in the Modern English language. In grammar, a phrase is traditionally understood as a combination of words that is not a primary predication structure. The question of the place of the phrase a lot of within the system of parts of speech of the English language has not been solved in anglistics until now. In this work we are making an attempt to suggest our solution of the problem. The difficulties of the definition of the grammatical status of the lexeme a lot of are closely connected with the general problem of definition of the parts of speech which remains topical since the time of Aristotle. There exist a number of grammatical classifications of Parts of Speech, based upon different criteria .The question of the criteria is decisive when one deals with classification of the words of any language into certain groups. Depending upon the criteria such groups of words can be called “lexical”, “grammatical”; “lexico-grammatical”. In our opinion the most appropriate way to find the place of a language unit in the system of the parts of speech is to analyze peculiarities of its functioning in speech using the principles of the prototype theory, which gives the possibility to take into account all content and formal characteristics of a lexeme under analysis , refer it to a certain conceptual category and in that way arrive at its place in a certain discourse – cognitive group of words, traditionally called the Parts of Speech. In the course of our analysis we came to the conclusion that semantic and formal characteristics of the lexeme lot correspond to those of the prototypical ones of the noun.Thus, the phrase a lot of constitutes a syntactic construction consisting of the noun lot, which has a quantitative meaning, its prepositional determiner (the article a) and its postpositional prepositional modifier (with the preposition of).
Key words: Phrase,a lot of, prototype, noun, determiner ,part of speech,lexeme, pronoun.
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