Zero ending: examples. Zero-ending words

As a rule, the question of what a zero ending is, raises many questions for those who study the theory of the Russian language, whether it be Russian schoolchildren or foreigners. Difficulties arise, firstly, when it is necessary to distinguish words without inflection (without ending) from words with zero inflection (zero ending).

Main criterion

In general, the main criterion for distinguishing is formulated simply: words with a zero ending are mutable words, and words without a ending are immutable. However, this wording is simple only for those who know exactly which words are changing and which are not. This is precisely the “insidiousness” of this question: before you figure out what a zero ending is, you need to understand what a grammatical change is, the words of which parts of speech change and which ones don’t, what is the ending, unlike all the others parts of the word (morpheme).

If the words do not fit together

Only babies who begin to speak do not try to adapt the words to each other. They either cunningly avoid this necessity by “inventing” such words that do not need to be adapted, or constitute “wrong” sentences from the point of view of adults.

For example, a Russian baby can say: “Mom bai” (“Mom sleeps”), “Typewriter bye-bye” (“The typewriter has left”, “The typewriter is gone”, “The typewriter is gone”), “The kitty is bang” (“The kitty has fallen” ) The words “bai”, “bye-bye”, “bang” not only do not have the ability to somehow change, but do not need it. They can equally well be combined with nouns of various kinds and numbers: "Grandfather Bai", "Cars bye-bye", "Cat bach". Sentences with such words do not look “wrong”, but are perceived as “children’s”.

In other cases, babies say “wrong,” and this wrongness is very well felt by adults as a distortion of the adult language. It can be personal forms of the verb used incorrectly: “Cars are sleeping” (“Cars are sleeping”), or an infinitive used instead of the personal form of the verb: “Cars are sleeping” (“Cars are sleeping”), “Vova is sleeping” (“Vova is sleeping” )

Variable and immutable words in children's speech

As you can see, in the first case, the sentence is not perceived as incorrect, since the selected verb does not imply its adaptation to other words. It’s like a verb with a universal, suitable for all uniform form (bang, tyu-tyu, bai). These are unchangeable words, in their composition there is no such part which, changing, would adapt the verb to different nouns.

In the second case, the verb does not have such a universal regular form. Each time, combining with nouns of a different kind and number, the verb must somehow change in order to get the correct phrase. The verb has possibilities for this, since it has an ending: changing, it changes the form of the verb.

Variable and immutable words in the "adult" language

In general, in the "adult" language, everything is approximately the same. One part of the words, having endings, implies its change in order to adapt to other words, and the other part, without having an ending, cannot change, and when combined with other words, it remains unchanged.

For example, the adjective “cute” has an ending, which, changing, changes the form of the word, allowing it to repeat the form of the noun: “pretty girl”, “pretty little elephant”, “pretty relationship”, “pretty faces”, “pretty people” and etc. Among these may be words with a zero ending. Examples are easiest to find among masculine singular nouns: "home", "garden", key. "

But the adverb “far”, on the contrary, does not imply any changes and, forming a phrase with verbs, does not change in any way: “far gone”, “far jumped out”, “far run away”, “far gone”, etc.

Endings and word forms

It is customary to speak about the form of a word only when it can change it, that is, when it has an ending. The adjective “cute” has exactly as many forms as endings. But the adverb “far” has no endings or forms.

The forms of a word that changes are called word forms. All of them for the same word are called the inflection paradigm. This is one and the same word, but represented in all the richness of its forms, each of which differs from each other in its grammatical meaning. For example, the word “cute” has such a grammatical meaning: nominative, masculine, singular. And the word forms “cute” have the following grammatical meaning: instrumental, plural. Words with a zero ending are obviously word forms, since any ending, including zero, is intended to form a word form.

Endings and grammatical meaning

Formally (visually and by ear), these word forms differ from each other precisely by endings, and it is the endings that give or take away one or another grammatical meaning from the word.

So, if we talk about the end of the "ouch" of the word "sympathetic", then it has all the listed grammatical meanings (as the prefix "from" in the word "run away" has the meaning of "removal").

Each ending has its own grammatical meaning and can inform the word form. However, of course, there are severe restrictions on this. For example, the ending with “s” cannot give the meaning “instrumental, plural” to the noun “dog”, since it has a completely different paradigm of endings.

The same can be said about zero-term words. Examples: the zero ending of the word “night” has the meaning “nominative case, singular”.

There are no sounds, but there is an ending

If the word is changeable, it means that it must have an ending, in absolutely all forms. And it doesn’t matter if this ending is expressed by sounds (letters) or not. In a large number of cases, the ending is represented, as they say, “zero sound”: after the base there are no sounds, but this does not mean that there is no ending.

For example, in the word “dog” there is no sound following the root, however, the end of this word as the variable part of speech is, it is this ending that is called “zero”: dog Ø.

The meaning of this word form is the nominative case, the singular noun having a masculine gender. It is easy to “feel” the zero ending if you understand that it is precisely because the “zero sound” at the place of the end in this case is perceived as having this grammatical meaning. So, “zero of sound” here has the meaning of “nominative case, singular” of the masculine noun.

It is important to understand that the zero ending of nouns is homonymous with the zero ending of verbs, since these two endings have completely different meanings and form different word forms.

Significant absence

Thus, such an absence cannot be called an absence in the proper sense of the word. There is no ending for the adverb “gloriously”, the participle “sowing”, the preposition “in”, the particle “not”. The word “dog” has no ending, but is represented by “zero of sound”. And the null endings of the verbs form the past tense of the singular (carried, carried, soaps), and it cannot be said that these words have no ending.

The absence itself is significant, significant. This can be compared with the mass of purely everyday cases. For example, we often agree with each other: “If something goes wrong, I'll call you back. And if I don’t call, then everything is in order, everything is going according to plan. ”

It is the same here: if the word “dog” has the ending represented by “zero of sound”, then its form is a nominative case, a singular.

How not to confuse a “significant” absence with the usual

Having agreed that if everything is in order and everything goes according to plan, they won’t call us back, we often begin to worry at the appointed time: what if the absence of a call is not a sign that everything is in order, and our partner simply can’t call ?

For approximately the same reason, confusion often arises with how to distinguish a zero ending from its absence. As already mentioned at the very beginning of the article, the most important criterion is simple: words with zero endings change, but without them - no.

To understand what is before us: the zero ending (significant absence) or its absence, you need to try to change the word: “dog” - “dog”, “dog”. First, the word changes, which in itself is already an indicator that it has an ending. Secondly, other endings appeared at the place of zero, making up the ending paradigm of this word.

It is important to be careful about the change: you need to change the exact same word (that is, change only the grammatical meaning), and not form new ones. So, the adjective “convenient” is not a form of the adverb “convenient”. When changing the form of a word, its part of speech, of course, should remain the same.

Immutable Words

To be sure that you have a zero ending or its absence, it is very important to be guided in which words of which parts of speech are unchangeable.

Immutable words include the following:

• Adverb (an adverb is an invariable part of speech, so you cannot say that an adverb has a zero ending). Examples: tired, comfortable, instantly, joyfully, beautifully, badly, sadly, about, far. Please note that the dialects do not always end with an “o”: not for nothing, I’m drunk, rash, involuntarily, yesterday, spring, a little, a lot, triple, twice, four, now, in the morning, tomorrow, in the afternoon, later, after a while, always, in the evening, at night, there, close, here, left, forward, towards, on the side, swim, crawl, shuffle, back down ...

The similarity of adverbs and some forms of adjectives and verbs is insidious: "Mom tiredly sat on the edge of the sofa" (tiredly - an adverb). "The sun seemed tired and very quickly disappeared behind the clouds" (tiredly - a verb).

• The participle (the participle is an unchanging part of speech, these words also lack a zero ending). Examples: clinging, holding, touching, earning, reading.
• The initial form of the verb (in the scientific and methodological frame of reference where ti -t and considered suffixes, rather than endings), for example: to sleep, to dream, to educate, listen to, print, train, love.
• Comparative forms of adjectives and adverbs: smarter, redder.
• All service parts of speech.
• All interjections.
• All onomatopoeic words: woof-woof, meow-meow. Sometimes authors of literary texts deliberately beat out such words by changing them: "All the cocks have already sounded, and he was still asleep."
• Unbreakable nouns, for example: car, coat, baroque, taxi, coffee. True, there is a point of view that these words have endings: precisely because they are nouns (usually such a point of view is not considered in the school curriculum).
• Unbreakable adjectives, for example: Bordeaux, Khaki.
• Possessive pronouns that indicate belonging to a third party, for example: their, her, him.

In general, it is not difficult to remember these groups of words, but in complex cases or cases of uncertainty, an additional criterion, as already mentioned, will be the ability to change a specific word.