It is always hard for any person to speak about oneself. My trouble is that I am rather young, so there is not much to speak about. To begin with, my name is Natasha. But actually very few people address me this way. My friends and relatives call me Tasha for short. I was born on the twentyfirst of November 1987 to a family of a teacher and a military man. I have a brother, 4 years older than me. I am happy to have an elder brother who is my best friend on the one hand and on the other - a person who is much older than myself, so I can always turn to him with my troubles and for a piece of advice. It is a pity there are only four of us in the family. I like big friendly families but nowadays there is a tendency
to have just one child or no children at all.

Test 1

In the sphere of syntax we have to look for syntactical synonyms differing from each other by their stylistic colouring. We may look for two sets of cases: (1) each of the two syntactical synonyms has a peculiar stylistic colouring of its own, (2) of two syntactical synonyms one is stylistically neutral, that is, it may appear in every sort of style, while the other has a distinct stylistic colouring, that is to say, its use is limited to definite stylistic conditions.

In the sphere of nouns there is not much to be noted in the way of stylistic colouring. In a very few cases where a noun has alternative plural forms, the irregular form (the one not in -s) naturally tends to have a high-flown, archaic, or poetic flavour. The very fact that there exists a plural form in -s alongside of it gives the other form the character of something unusual and restricted in use to special purposes. The only two words that have to be mentioned in this connection are, brother with its alternative plural form brethren differing from brothers not in stylistic colouring alone, and cow, with its alternative plural form kine having a very strong archaic and poetic tinge.

Though problems of style as such are outside the scope of this book, some remarks concerning the stylistic value of grammatical categories and grammatical elements may prove appropriate to a thorough study of English grammatical structure.

It will often be found in Modern English, as in other languages, that some element of a sentence apparently necessary to its meaning is not actually there and its function is taken up by some other element. We will first illustrate this general statement by two examples which will at the same time show two different ways of expressing the function of an element which is not there: (1) I could not find him, though I wanted to.

And then, one November evening as Clyde was walking along Wykeage Avenue, just west of Central, a portion of the locally celebrated avenue which, ever since he had moved to Mrs Peyton's he was accustomed to traverse to and from his work, one thing did occur which in so far as he and the Griffiths were concerned was destined to bring about a chain of events which none of them could possibly have foreseen.

This problem may be formulated as follows: is the sentence the highest existing syntactical unit, or are there higher syntactical units than the sentence — units of which a sentence is but a component part?

In this final section we will consider some general questions of the structure of Modern English. Over the last few decades many new problems have arisen in the study of sentence structure. Some of them are strictly grammatical, others tend in some measure to reach into the lexical and semantic sphere. One of these problems is that of autosemantic and synsemantic sentences. These terms denote the difference between sentences whose meaning is clear in itself, and does not require either the preceding or the following environment (we might also say: either the left-hand or the right-hand environment) to make it clear, and sentences whose meaning does require such environment and is not clear without it.

Though punctuation is not in itself part of the grammatical structure of a language, it cannot be passed over in silence in a treatise on grammar, as it may, and often does, acquire grammatical significance. The other layer of language with which punctuation is connected is of course its phonetic layer, namely intonation.