TRILINGUAL ANALYSIS OF THE NUMBER CATEGORY: IDENTIFICATION OF INTERFERENCE ZONES IN THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF INTEGRATED LESSONS IN ARMENIAN, RUSSIAN AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES

Abstract

In the early 80s, contrastive and comparative typological studies ceased to be limited only to the goals of language teaching, trying to penetrate into the essence of language processes and better understand the zones governing these processes, showing a strong tendency to acquire an independent status of linguistics. The tendencies of defining both the theoretical basis and specific research methods in this field were outlined, as well as the desire for deeper insight into the nature of linguistic phenomena at different linguistic levels, considered in a comparative analysis with linguistic phenomena of other languages (related, unrelated). However, all theoretical studies of a contrastive nature were more or less directly related to the methodology of teaching foreign languages. In the above-mentioned perspective, we conducted a comparative typological study of the category of numbers in the Armenian, Russian and English languages in order to determine interference and transposition zones at the scientific level in the organization of integrated lessons of the Armenian, Russian and English languages. The appeal to this grammatical category is due to the fact that it is one of the most common. In certain languages, the opposition of the corresponding grammatical numbers is usually represented by some synthetic means (for example, in Armenian, English), although sometimes the number is expressed not in the noun itself, but directly in the agreed word (for example, in French) or not only in the noun, but also in the agreed word (for example, in Russian). The ways of expressing a number are determined by the peculiarities of the language type; at the same time, both mandatory and optional number expressions are observed. In the languages under consideration (Armenian, English, Russian,) the grammatical category of a number has two grammemes: singular and plural. Despite the simplicity of this obvious binary opposition, specific features in these languages are highlighted, which are discussed in detail in the article. The trilingual typological study made it possible to determine interference and transposition zones at the scientific level, which will serve as a methodological basis for organizing integrated lessons in Armenian, Russian and English languages.

Keywords: comparative typological analysis of linguistic material, category of language, trilingual analysis, Armenian, English, Russian, similarities and differences.