Теоретическая грамматика английского языка = Theoretical Grammar of the English Language. Учебное пособие

expresses inducement, either affirmative or negative. It urges the listener in the form of request or command to perform or not to perform a certain action. The interrogative sentence expresses a question, i.e. a request for information wanted by the speaker from the listener. The interrogative sentence is naturally connected with an answer forming together with it a question-answer dialogue unity (Blokh, 2000).

These 3 cardinal communicative types of sentences are called direct types. There are also indirect types.

1.Declarative in form, interrogative in meaning. E.g. "I wonder why they come to me about it.

2.Interrogative in form, declarative in meaning, e.g. different rhetorical questions. E.g. Can a leopard change his spots? It should be noted that in living speech responses to rhetorical questions exactly correspond to responses elicited by declarative sentences.

3.Declarative in form, imperative in meaning. The expression of inducement within the framework of a declarative sentence is regularly achieved by means of constructions with modal verbs. E.g.: You must listen attentively You ought to get rid of it.

4.Imperative in form, declarative in meaning. Inducive constructions, according to the described general tendency, can be used to express a declarative meaning complicated by corresponding connotations. Such utterances are distinguished by especially high expressiveness and intensity. E.g. Talk of the devil and he will appear. Due to its expressiveness this kind of declarative inducement, similar to rhetorical questions, is used in proverbs. Don't count your chickens before they are hatched.

5.Imperative in form, interrogative in meaning. E.g.: "Tell me about your upbringing."

6.Interrogative in form, imperative in function The reverse intermediary construction, i.e. inducement effected in the form of question, is employed in order to convey such additional shades of meaning as request, invitation, suggestion, softening of a command, etc. E.g.: "Why don't you go there yourself?

The division of simple sentences according to the purpose of communication is closely connected with such a branch of linguistics as pragmatics. Pragmatics appeared as a reaction to structural linguistics outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure.

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Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature, talk in interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy,sociology, linguistics and anthropology.

Ways of expressing different purposes of communication of the speaker, i.e. his “communicative intentions” are studied by the branch of linguistics called “pragmatic linguistics” or “pragmalinguistics”. Its founders are Oxford scholars John Austin and John Searle. In accordance with the principles of pragmalinguistics, communicative intentions of the speaker are realized in his “speech acts”, each of them characterized by a definite communicative intention. Such are state-

Among speech acts there are two naturally opposed types:

1.constative utterances (constatives) which express the speaker’s reflection of reality;

2.performative utterances (performatives) which render such verbal actions of the speaker as immediately constituting his social functions. Pronouncing this kind of utterances the speaker performs his complete function. E.g.: I declare the conference open. (I open the conference by pronouncing the sentence.)

The performative utterance includes (or implies) the pronoun of the first person singular, while the verb is used only in the form of the present tense of the indicative mood, active.

Compare: I declare the conference open (Performative). I declared the conference open (Constative). He declares the conference open (Constative).

Performative utterances belong to the declarative type of sentences. The contemporary use of the term “speech act – illocutionary act” goes back to J. L. Austin's development of performative utterances and

his theory of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts.

Ch. Fries’s classification

The American scholar Ch. Fries classified the sentences not according to the purposes of communication, but according to the responses they elicit. So utterances collected from the tape-record corpus of dialogues were first classified into “situation utterances” (eliciting a re-

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sponse) and “response utterances”. Then situational utterances were further divided into three groups:

1)Utterances that are regularly followed by oral responses only (greetings, calls, questions), e.g.: Good-bye! What are you doing to do?

2)Utterances regularly eliciting action response, e.g.: Oh, wait a minute!

3) Utterances regularly eliciting conventional ( ,

) signals of attention. They are statements, e.g.: I’ve

met John. – Yes? She can’t come today because she is busy. – I see.

Alongside the described “communicative utterances”, i.e. utterances directed to a definite listener, Ch. Fries points out minor type of utterances which are not directed to any listener. They can express surprise, sudden pain, anger, laughter and so on (Goodness! My God! Gosh!).

This classification of utterances confirms and specifies the traditional classification built up on the principle of the “purpose of communication”. The very purpose of communication of the addressing sentence is reflected in the listener’s response.

Composite sentence

The composite sentence is formed by two or more predicative lines. It expresses a complicated act of thought, i.e. an act of mental activity, which falls into 2 or more intellectual efforts closely connected with one another. The composite sentence reflects two or more elementary situational events viewed as making up a unity. Each predicative unit in a composite sentence makes up a clause. The clauses are related to one another on different semantic grounds. The clause corresponds to a simple sentence, but the composite sentence does not correspond to logically connected sequence of simple sentences (Blokh, 2000).

Independent sentences are utterances each expressing an event of self-significance. They express events in their natural temporal succession and do not make up a situational unity. The composite sentence obtains this kind of unity. As a structural unit of the language, it is indispensable for language by its own purely semantic merits.

Composite sentences display two principal types of construction: hypotaxis (subordination) and parataxis (coordination). Both types are equally representative of colloquial speech, though mainly their use is characteristic of literary written speech.

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By coordination, the clauses are arranged as units of syntactically equal rank, by subordination as units of unequal rank, one being categorically dominated by the other. A subordinate clause might render the information very important for the whole communication but it presents it as naturally supplementing the information of the principal clause. A subordinate clause as a rule refers to one notional constituent (a word or phrase) in a principal clause. At the same time, a sequential clause in a compound sentence refers to the whole of the leading clause and that is why the position of a coordinative clause is rigidly fixed in all clauses (Prof. M.Y. Blokh distinguishes the ‘leading’ and ‘sequential’ clauses in the compound sentence. The latter includes the connector, thus being turned into some kind of dependent clause though this dependence is not subordinate). It can be used as first criterion of coordination in distinction to subordination. Another proof of rank equality of clauses in coordination is a potential possibility for any coordinative sequential clauses to take the copulative conjunction ‘and/or’ the adversative conjunction ‘but’ as introducers.

I do not like this place, so/and/but I never go there.

The means of combining clauses into a polypredicative sentence are divided into syndetic (conjunctional) and asyndetic (non-conjunc- tional). According to the traditional view, all composite sentences are to be classed into compound and complex sentences. Both types of sentences can have syndetic or asyndetic type of clause connection. This view was criticized by some scholars, especially prof. N.S. Pospelov who stressed that at the highest level of classification all sentences should be divided into syndetic and asyndetic, while at the lower level the syndetic composite sentences (and only these) should be divided into compound and complex ones. Prof. B.A.Ilyish stressed that this non-traditional approach cannot be recognized.

Indeed, if we compare, for example, the following asyndetic composite sentences with their compound syndetic counterparts on the basis of paradigmatic approach, we shall immediately see equality in their semantico-syntactic status: She hesitated a moment, (and) then she answered him. He was going to refuse, (but) we did not understand why. It would be also irrational to deny a subordinate status to the asyndetic attributive, objective or predicative clause (You are the cleverest person I have ever seen (attr.). I am afraid there is no doubt at it (obj.). The fact is he did accept invitation (predic.)

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Thus, both syndetical and asyndetical types of chain connection are typical of complex as well as of compound sentences. Asyndetic connection of clauses is characterized by its own functional value. This value supports the very existence of asyndetic polypredication (Blokh, 2000).

Compound sentence

A compound sentence is a sentence consisting of two or more clauses coordinated with each other (Blokh, 2000). By coordination, the clauses are arranged as units of syntactically equal rank, Prof. M.Y.Blokh distinguishes the ‘leading’ and ‘sequential’ clauses in the compound sentence. The latter includes the connector, thus being turned into some kind of dependent clause though this dependence is not subordinate. We share the view of Prof. B.A.Ilyish that clause in a compound sentence may be connected either 1) syndetically (by means of coordinationg conjunctions or conjunctive adverbs or 2) asyndetically (without a conjunction or conjunctive adverb).

There are 4 types of coordination:

Complex Sentence

The complex sentence is based on hypotaxis, i.e. subordination. The subordinate clause can be joined to the principal clause either by a subordinating connector, or, with some types of clauses, asyndetically.

According to their integral features all subordinate clauses are divided into four generalized types: clauses of primary nominal sitions, clauses of secondary nominal positions, clauses of adverbial positions, clauses of parenthetical positions (Blokh, 2000).

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Formal Indicators of Subordination

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Compound-complex sentences

Long complicated compound-complex sentences are characteristic of written English and can sometimes present difficulties for translation. In such cases syntactic analysis is necessary.

Pattern of analysis

“And the truth was that he was ready to leave Debbie for her, but he knew that if he told Marielle that, it would frighten her and make her feel guilty”.

It is a compound-complex sentence which consists of 2 coordinate clauses and 3 subordinate clauses. The first coordinate clause is ‘And the truth was’. The second coordinate clause is ‘but he knew’. The type of coordination is adversative, the clauses are coordinated with the help of the conjunction ‘but’.

‘that he was ready to leave Debbie for her’ is the subordinate predicative clause. It is connected to its principal clause ‘And the truth was’ syndetically, by means of the conjunction ‘that’.

‘that… it would frighten her and make her feel guilty’ is the subordinate object clause. It is connected to its principal clause ‘he knew’ syndetically, by means of the conjunction ‘that’.

‘if he told Marielle that’ is the subordinate adverbial clause of condition, second degree of subordination. It is connected to its principal clause ‘it would frighten her and make her feel guilty’ syndetically, by means of the conjunction ‘that’.

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Parcellation

Besides the classical types of coordination and subordination, we find another case of the construction of composite sentences. It is the case when the clause of the composite sentence is used independently, that is it can be separated in the text thus being changed into a specific independent sentence. There are such terms for these clauses as parcelled, separated, and fragmentary. Such clauses constitute a special structural type, both in oral and written speech. The parcelled construction presents two or more collocations separated by a sentence form but related to one another as parts of one and the same sentence (Blokh, 2000).

Do not speak so loudly. Because the children are afraid.

The parcelled construction is produced as a result of transposing a sentence into a cumuleme (cumuleme is a suprasentential construction of one direction communicative type (from one speaker to his listener) formed by two or more independent sentences making up a topical syntactic unity). Parcellation usually has an emphasizing function. It can be proved by transformation, which deprives the parcelled part of its position of topical significance changing it into an ordinary sen- tence-part. Ex. 1) Why be so insistent, Jim? If he does not want to tell you. – 2) Why be so insistent, Jim, if he does not want to tell you?

Text. Textual Units. Textual categories

Language is realized in speech, in speech activity. The result of speech activity is text (written product) or discourse (oral communication). In the middle of the 20th century there appeared a new branch of linguistics – text linguistics. Text linguistics studies: 1) a text in the broad sense of the word, macrotext; 2) a complex syntactic unity - text in the narrow sense of the word, microtext.

Though linguistics of text as a special branch of linguistics appearesd not so long ago, texts have always attracted attention as a special object of study. Initially, this concerned sacred texts playing a central role in all major religions. Later, other types of texts, in particular, legal and literary texts, became the object of study. From the end of the 19th century the texts became the subject of close attention of ethnologists - Linguistic and Ethnographic School of American Studies, founded by F. Boas. However, as we have already mentioned, the text as a structure becomes an object of special interest only in the

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20 century. The most famous early work on the structure of the text belongs to the Russian folklorist and literary critic V.Y. Propp (Morphology of the Fairy-Tale, 1928). The discovery of Propp was that in fairy tales there are a limited number of types of events and characters, and they are very stable, although they can be realized in different ways. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Propp's book was translated into English and French, it was a scientific bestseller and had a significant impact on a number of scientific areas, including semiotics and text linguistics. In particular, this concerns the French structuralists and semiologists (K.Levi-Strauss, R.Bart, et al).

Another source of ideas for Western European linguistics text was the Czech linguistic school. Under the influence of the Czech school in Western Europe in the 1960s, the linguistic theory of the text began to form (P.Hartmann, R.Harweg, Z.Shmidt, T. A. van Dijk, V.Dressler, J.Petefi, K.Gausenblaz, P.Sgall, I.Bellert, N.Enquist, and others). In this tradition, the text was initially analyzed primarily by structural, taxonomic methods, by analogy with more familiar language objects. However, by the mid-1970s, the text was rethought as a communicative process, and after that the linguistics of the text was "reborn" into a discursive analysis. Thus, one of the founders of the linguistics of the text and its most active developer, the Dutch linguist T.A. van Dijk, in the second half of the 1970s switched from textual to discourse terminology, which marked the transition from a static to a dynamic approach.

In the USSR there was also an interest in language objects bigger than the sentence. Early works in this field belong to I.A. Figurovsky and N.S Pospelov. The terms “super phrasal unity’ and ‘complex syntactic unity” were introduced by Russian linguists. In the 1950s and 1960s N.Yu.Shvedova, T.Vinokur, E.V.Paducheva, etc. did research into the structure of the text. In particular, they raised issues of the structure of the paragraph and semantics of interphase relations in the text. Linguistics of the text developed in 1970-1980-s in the works of M.I. Otkupshchikova, I.R. Galperin, V.G.Gak, B.M.Gasparov, O.I.Moskalskaya, Z.Ya.Turaeva, and others. The range of issues considered in these papers is very broad, but the following can be mentioned as the main ones: prosody and intonation in the text; textual implementation of smaller language units (phonemes, morphemes, etc.); the general structure of the text; time and modality in the text;

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reference in the text; typology of texts; the contribution of text linguistics to literary studies and language teaching.

One of the best works summarizing the results of text linguistics is a textbook by M.I. Otkupshchikova “Syntax of a coherent text“ (Leningrad, 1983). This work summarizes the main issues of text linguistics - the boundaries and units of the text, coherence, means of cohesion.

In modern science, text is in most cases is regarded as a particular aspect of a broader phenomenon – discoursem which is studied in the

Any text is a coherent stretch of speech which is a semantico-topi- cal and syntactic unity. Sentences organized in dictemes make up textual stretches on syntactic lines according to a communicative purpose in a particular communicative situation. As a result, a textual stretch has a unifying topic. So, in syntactic terms a text is a strictly topical stretch of talk (a continual succession of dictemes) centering on a common informative purpose. In the framework of the given understanding of text, it has two main differential features: topical (semantic) unity and semantico-syntactic cohesion (Blokh, 2000).

Textual categories appear and function only in the text as a language unit of the highest rank. Textual categories reveal the cardinal and the most general differential features of the text. Today the list of textual categories is open: linguists name different textual categories because they approach the text from different angles. To the list of textual categories scholars usually refer cohesion, informativeness, retrospection, modality, causality, implication, the author's image, and some others.

In spite of the diversity of opinions on the question, most linguists agree that the basic textual categories are topical unity and seman- tico-syntactic cohesion. It is conditioned by the fact that the general idea of a sequence of sentences forming a text includes these two notions. On the one hand, it presupposes a succession of spoken or written utterances irrespective of their forming or not forming coherent semantic complex. On the other hand, it implies a strictly topical stretch of talk, i.e. a continual succession of sentences centering on a common informative purpose. It is this latter understanding of the text that is syntactically relevant. It is in this latter sense that the text can be interpreted as a lingual entity with its two distinguishing features: first, semantic (topical) unity, second, semantico-syntactic cohesion (Blokh, 2000).

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