- •С.В. Иванова
- •Ббк 81.2 Англ
- •Foreword
- •Preface
- •Preface to the second edition
- •Major trends in Theoretical Grammar of the English language
- •Classical English grammar
- •Transformational grammar
- •Functional Communicative Approach
- •Cognitive Grammar and Cognitive Linguistics
- •Supplementary literature:
- •2. Major grammatical notions
- •Language as a system
- •Chart 1. Syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations
- •Chart 2. Paradigmatic patterns of a clause by m.A.K. Halliday
- •Interrogative→ “wh”
- •Indicative→ declarative→
- •Imperative → jussive38 →
- •Inclusive
- •Grammatical meaning, grammatical form and grammatical category
- •E.G. Work –worked
- •The notion of opposition in Theoretical Grammar
- •Synthetic and analytic forms
- •Morphology and Syntax as two main parts of grammar
- •Chart 3. The scope of morphology
- •Inflection word-formation
- •3. The notion of a morpheme
- •The idea and the definition of the morpheme
- •Types of morphemes
- •Problems connected with the notion of a morpheme
- •Characteristic features of inflectional morphology and types of word-form derivation
- •4. The parts of speech system
- •In foreign linguistics
- •Introduction to the problem
- •Classification of parts of speech suggested by Henry Sweet
- •3. O. Jespersen’s classification of parts of speech
- •4. Principles of the classification of words suggested by Charles Fries
- •Woggles ugged diggles
- •Uggs woggled digs
- •5. Classifications of parts of speech developed within structuralist linguistics
- •6. R. Quirk’s approach to the problem in his
- •Verb Preposition
- •Interjection
- •Modern grammars of contemporary English
- •5. The parts of speech system
- •In russian linguistics
- •The main criteria for the classification of parts of speech in Russian Linguistics
- •The concept of notional and formal words
- •6. The article
- •1. The status of the article in English
- •2. The number of articles in English
- •3. The categorial meaning and the functions of the article
- •7. Noun and its grammatical categories
- •Introduction. The categories of gender and number
- •The category of case
- •The syntactic function of the noun
- •8. The verb. General characteristics
- •The verb. General overview
- •2. The categories of person and number
- •3. The category of tense
- •9. The category of aspect
- •In modern english
- •The definition of aspect as a verbal category
- •Different approaches to the interpretation of aspect
- •The connection of the aspect interpretation with other lexicological issues: terminative and durative verbs
- •The correlation of the English aspect forms and Russian aspect forms
- •10. The category of retrospective coordination
- •The problem of the Perfect forms in the system of the English language
- •2. Different approaches to the interpretation of perfect forms
- •Interpretation of perfect forms as an independent grammatical category
- •11. The category of mood in modern english
- •1. The category of mood and its semantic content
- •Debatable issues connected with the interpretation of the category of mood
- •12. The category of voice
- •In modern english
- •The nature of the grammatical category of voice
- •2. Debatable problems within the category of voice
- •He told me a story.
- •3. The notion of transitivity
- •13. Syntax
- •Syntax as a branch of grammar
- •Units of syntactic description
- •The theory of phrase
- •Types of syntactic relations (linkage)
- •14. The sentence
- •The sentence: the problem of its definition
- •2. The sentence. Its major categories
- •3. Typology of the sentence
- •15. Sentence as an object of syntactic studies
- •Major features of the sentence as a syntactic unit
- •Syntactic structure of the sentence as an object of linguistic studies
- •Immediate constituents of the sentence: ic analysis
- •Adjoinment - the use of specifying words, most often particles: He did it – Only he did it.
- •The utterance. Informative structure of the utterance
- •Basic notions of pragmatic linguistics
- •Speech act theory. Direct and indirect speech acts. Types of speech acts
- •Discourse analysis as the study of language in use
- •Implicatures of discourse
- •It is only due to making an assumption about the relevance of b’s response that we can understand it as an answer to a’s question.
- •Implicatures and indirectness
- •A List of Selected Bibliography
- •List of reference and practice books
- •Terminological dictionaries
- •Seminars in theoretical grammar
- •Contents
15. Sentence as an object of syntactic studies
Major features of the sentence as a syntactic unit.
Syntactic structure of the sentence as an object of linguistic studies.
Principal and secondary parts of the sentence: sentence parsing;
Immediate constituents of the sentence: IC analysis;
Oppositional analysis;
Constructional analysis.
The utterance. Informative structure of the utterance.
Basic notions of pragmatic linguistics.
Speech act theory. Direct and indirect speech acts. Types of speech acts.
Discourse analysis as the study of language in use:
Maxims of politeness;
Implicatures of discourse;
Implicatures and indirectness;
Textual deictic markers.
Major features of the sentence as a syntactic unit
The survey of the approaches to the definition of the sentence as a syntactic unit testifies to the fact that it still remains a challenging object of studies due to a combination of lingual and extra lingual features, and a variety of logical, psychological, and philosophical aspects characterizing the sentence. Nevertheless when it comes to its basic peculiarities grammarians are agreed on a number of fundamental characteristics. On the whole, the sentence is understood as the central syntactic construction used as a minimal communicative unit that has its primary predication, actualises a certain structural scheme and is characterised by a corresponding intonation contour. However this definition does not address the debatable question whether the sentence may only be referred to language or both to language and speech. This definition works only in case the difference between the sentence and the utterance is not taken into account. But there are scholars who insist on the distinction between the sentence and the utterance because the sentence is an abstract theoretical entity defined within the theory of grammar whereas the utterance is its actual use. In other words, the problem boils down to the distinction between the sentence described as a unit of language and the utterance defined as a unit of speech.
Taken as a sign the sentence is characterized by (a) its structural features, i.e. subject-predicate relations (primary predication), (b) its semantic features, which refers to the way it presents objective reality, and (c) its pragmatic potential which is understood within the sign theory as a relation to the user.
One of the essential issues in the description of the sentence as a lingual unit is its relation to objective reality it is supposedly designed to reflect. The reflection of objective reality presupposes two major processes. First, it is conceptualized, i.e. it gets its mental representation by means of concepts, frames, schemata or scenarios. Then these packages of knowledge get their verbal representation. Thus, mental (cognitive) entity finds its lingual embodiment. The thought formed in response to some stimulus springs in human mind in the form of a proposition. Proposition is one of the fundamental notions of syntactic theory. In plain terms, propositions may be interpreted as the content of the thought78. As a notion, a proposition is defined as the semantic invariant of the thought devoid of any modal or communicative charge [ЛЭС 1990: 401]. In other words, it is ‘a claim which can, at least in principle, be determined either true or false’, or still in other words it is ‘a claim that a certain state of affairs does or does not exist [Kroeger 2006: 53]. It implies the establishment of predicative relations between the elements of the situational event as it is reflected in human mind. That enables linguists to state that a proposition of the clause is made up by the subject and finite together. It can be affirmed, denied, questioned, and negotiated be speakers in other ways (wished about, hoped for, demanded, etc.) [The Linguistics Encyclopedia 1995: 143]. The element of meaning which identifies the property or relationship is called the predicate:
E.g.: John is hungry.
Mary snores.
John loves Mary.
Mary is slapping John.
The individuals (or participants) of whom the property or relationship is claimed to be true (John and Mary) are called arguments. Basic predicative meanings of the typical English sentence are expressed by the finite verb that is immediately connected with the subject of the sentence (primary predication).
To sum it up, the sentence is a unit of the syntactic level of language, it is characterized by predicativity which is a lingual representation of proposition understood as a predicative thought.