Tasks for seminar
COMMUNICATIVE SYNTAX.
1.Grammatical category of person
2. Actual division of the sentence
3. Communicative types of sentences.
SEMANTIC SYNTAX.PRAGMATIC ASPECTS OF SYNTAX
1. “Semantic explosion”.
2. Proposition
3. Special status of a verbal word.
4. The theory of speech acts.
LECTURES
COMMUNICATIVE SYNTAX.
1.Grammatical category of person
2. Actual division of the sentence
3. Communicative types of sentences.
Terms: communication, interlocutor, actual division of the sentence, theme, rheme, psychological subject, psychological predicate, communicative purpose, declarative, interrogative, imperative, exclamatory
1. The category of person is viewed in grammars as morphological category realized either in the oppositions of verb forms: speak – speaks, have been speaking – has been speaking or has lexico-morphological realization by personal pronouns: I, we, you, he, she, it, they. In the verb the category of person has only formal character, but in the class of personal pronouns this category has meaningful character.
As conversation is communication and communication is impossible without speakers interlocultors, the appropriate positions are marked by the pronoun of the first person (addressant of speech) and the pronoun of the second person (addressee of speech). But the third person either is excluded from analysis, or is determined to the latter only in negative form, as the person who doesn’t take part in communication.
So, the third person is opposed to the first and the second on the basis of taking and not taking part in the act of communication. The fact of not-taking part in communication has very important consequence to subcategorization of the third person in the plan of its lingual (linguistic) realization: it can be expressed either by names, or corresponding personal pronouns.
For example, Tom loves Mary. Tom can be freely substituted by he; and the noun Mary – by she: He loves her.
Transformation in back direction isn’t difficult. So in the case of pronouns of the third person justify their title in the system of parts of speech = “pronoun” means “instead of the name”.
But the transformation of the pronouns of the first and the second person has some difficulty or even fails. In the sentence I love you the pronoun of the first person I corresponds to the speaker – the author of the sentence (the speaker (refers to) names himself by the pronoun of the first person); the pronoun You corresponds to the listener – the addressee of speech. In this sentence its author informs the listener about his feelings. But the attempt to change I into name corresponding to it with the meaning “speaker” leads to meaningful semantic deformation: the sentence
The speaker loves you. Will be the informing of the author of speech that some third person (the speaker) has some feelings to him. The same will be if we change the pronoun You into the name with the meaning “listener”. The sentence I love the listener will be the report of the author of speech to the listener that He the speaker has some feelings to the third person (the listener) who doesn’t take part in the speech act.
So, the pronouns of the first and the second person are not the pronouns in its direct meaning: they are not used instead of some names, and therefore, can’t be substituted by them without considerable change of referential semantics of the sentence.
We may conclude, that personal pronouns of the first and the second person are specialized lingual means indicating the positions of the numbers of communicative act and we may consider the category of person as communicative grammatical category.