One of the fundamental concepts of linguistics is the dichotomy of «language and speech» (langue—parole) introduced by F. de Saussure. According to it language is a system of elementary and complex signs-phonemes, morphemes, words, word combinations, utterances and combinations of utterances. Language as such a system exists m human minds only and linguistic forms or units can be systematise" into paradigms.

Units of language on different levels are studied by traditional branches of linguistics such as phonetics that deals with speech sounds and intonation; lexicology that treats words, their mean­ing and vocabulary structure, grammar that analyses forms of words and their function in a sentence which is studied by syn­tax. These areas of linguistic study are rather clearly defined and ave a long-term tradition of regarding language phenomena from a leve,-oriented point of view. Thus the subject matter and the material under study of these linguistic disciplines are more or less clear-cut.
It gets more complicated when we talk, about stylistics. Some scholars claim that this is a comparatively new branch of linguistics, which has only a few decades of intense linguistic interest behind it. The term stylistics really came into existence not too long ago. In point of fact the scope of problems and the object of stylistic study go as far back as ancient schools of rhetoric and poetics.

The traditional tendency to throw together everything that is not a noun, a verb or an adjective, and call it an ‘adverb’ is further illustrated by the fact that the italicized items in the following are also called adverbs

Sentences of the kind John is at the office have the verb be followed by an expression referring to a place. Very often the place complement is a prepositional phrase, but there are certain adverbs that also refer to place. In the following examples, those in group 1 have prepositional phrases as complements and those in group 2
have adverb phrases as complements:

Objects are elements that refer to participants distinct from the subject of the sentence.

In Chapter 3 (pp. 36–7) we saw that a sentence consists of a subject and a verb, and perhaps other elements following the verb. If other elements are necessary to complete the structure of the sentence, they are called complements; and if they are ‘optional extras’, giving circumstantial detail, they are called adjuncts.

In Chapter 3, when we studied the meaning of verbs, we found that the great majority are dynamic in meaning; that is, they denote events, happenings and actions which have beginnings and ends and develop through time. But there were a few verbs that denote states of affairs: He knows the way describes his state of mind, and we do not find it sensible to say *What he did was know the way, or *What happened was that
he knew the way.

We have taken the criterial functions of adjectives to be the attributive and the predicative functions. There is, however, another function that adjectives can fulfil, though it is of less importance and subject to very severe limitations.

Here are two lists of noun phrases containing attributive adjectives. Those in the first list could not easily have any kind of gradability associated with them, while those in the second could.