12. Communicative types of sentences.

The sentence is a communicative unit; therefore the primary classification of sentences must be based on the communicative principle. In accord with the purpose of communication 3 cardinal sentence-types have long been recognized in linguistic tradition: declarative, imperative, interrogative.

The declarative sentence expresses a statement (affirmative or negative). The imperative- inducement (either affirmative or negative), request and command. The interrogative- a question, request for information.

An early attempt to revise the traditional communicative classification of sentences was made by the American scholar Ch. Fries who classified them according to responses they elicit. In this system utterance is chosen as a universal speech unit.1. situation utterances 2. response utterances. Situation utterances were divided into 3 groups:

Followed by oral responses (greetings, calls, questions, “hallo! Dad!”)

Eliciting an action responses (requests/ commands)

Eliciting conventional signals of attention to continuous discourse (statements)

There is also another minor type of utterances: noncommunicative utterances (characteristic of surprise, anger, pain): Oh, oh! Goodness!

Alongside the three cardinal communicative sentence-types, another type is recognized in the theory of syntax, the so-called exclamatory sentence.Each of cardinal communicative sentences can be represented in 2 variants: exclamatory/ non- exclamatory (What a nice dog! /It’s a very nice dog. Then why in God’s name did you come! / Why did you come?).

Declarative sentences express certain proposition.(rheme makes up centre of the statement.)

Imperative sentences exp. an urge to do thms. / not to do thms.(rheme expresses informative nucleus of inducement. Its semantic subject is zeroed).

13 Correlation

The formal and the functional aspect of the morphemes within the composition of word may be gained in the light of the so-called “all-emic” theory put by Descriptive Linguistic. In accordance with this theory, lingual units are described by means of 2 types of terms: all-terms and eme-terms.

Eme-terms denote the generalized invariant units of language characterized by a certain functional status: phonemes, morphemes.

Allo-terms denote the concrete manifestations, or variants of the generalized units dependent on the regular co-location with other elements of language: allophones, allomorphs.

The allo-emic identification of lingual elements is achieved by means of so called “distributional analysis”. The aim of it is to fix and study the units of language in relation to their textual environments. The distribution of a unit is its environment in generalized terms of classes or categories.

2 stages of distributional analysis:1. The analyzed text is divided into recurrent segments consisting of phonemes. 2. The environ. Features of the morphs are established and the corresponding identifications are affected.

3 main types of distribution are discriminated in the distr.analysis, namely, contrastive distribution, non-contrastive distribution, and complementary d.

Contrastive and non-contrastive distributions concern identical environments of different morphs. Complementary distribution concerns different environmentsof formally different morphs which are united by the same meaning.

For analytical purposes the notion of complementary distribution is the most important, it helps establish the identity of different elements of language, its grammatical elements.