50. The utterance. Communicative and pragmatic types of utterance.

communicative types of utterances: exclamatory, imperatives, interrogatives, declaratives.

Speech can be described as an act of producing voice through the use of the vocal cords and vocal apparatus or other means, such as sign language, to create linguistic acts in the form of language that communicate information from an initiator to a recipient. In more colloquial terms, speech can be described in several different ways:

A linguistic act designed to convey information.

Various types of linguistic acts where the audience consists of more than one individual, including public speaking, oration, and quotation.

The physical act of speaking, primarily through the use of vocal cords to produce voice. See phonology and linguistics for more detailed information on the physical act of speaking.

However, speech can also take place inside one's head, known as intrapersonal communication, for example, when one thinks or utters sounds of approval or disapproval. At a deeper level, one could even consider subconscious processes, including dreams where aspects of oneself communicate with each other (see Sigmund Freud), as part of intrapersonal communication, even though most human beings do not seem to have direct access to such communication.

Charles Fries suggested classifying all the utterances not on the basis of their own semantics, but on the kind of responses which they elicit, or according to their external characteristics. He distinguished, first, utterances which are followed by oral responses (greetings, calls, questions, etc.); second, utterances followed by action responses (requests or commands); and third, utterances which elicit signals of attention to further conversation (statements); additionally, he distinguished a minor group of utterances, which are not directed to any interlocutor in particular and presuppose no response (“non-communicative utterances”, e.g., interjectional outcries).

Pragmatic utterance types performatives and constatives (representatives): performatives are treated as utterances by which the speaker explicitly performs a certain act, e.g.: I surrender; I pronounce you husband and wife; and constatives (representatives) as utterances by which the speaker states something, e.g.: I am a teacher; constatives are further subdivided into minor types, such as promissives (commissives), e.g.: I will help you; expressives, e.g.: How very sad!; menacives, e.g.: I’ll kill you!, directives, e.g.: Get out!; requestives, e.g.: Bring the chalk, please; etc.

52. The complex sentence as a polypredicative construction. Types of subordinative clauses.

The complex sentence is a polypredicative construction built on the principle of subordination (hypotaxis). In paradigmatic presentation, the derivational history of the complex sentence is as follows: two or more base sentences are clausalized and joined into one construction; one of them performs the role of a matrix in relation to the others, the insert sentences. The matrix base sentence becomes the principal clause of the complex sentence and the insert sentences become its subordinate clauses, e.g.: The team arrived. + It caused a sensation. à When the team arrived, it caused a sensation.

The minimal complex sentence includes two clauses: the principal one and the subordinate one. This is the main type of complex sentences, first, in terms of frequency, and, second, in terms of its paradigmatic status, because a complex sentence of any volume can be analyzed into a combination of two-clause complex sentence units.

Types of subordinate clauses:

a)subject and predicative clauses;

b)object, attributive clauses and adverbial clauses;

c)parenthetical clauses.

Different types of complex sentences are distinguished, first of all, on the basis of their subordinate clause types. Subordinate clauses are classified on two mutually complementary bases: on the functional principle and on the categorial principle.

According to the functional principle, subordinate clauses are divided on the analogy (though, not identity) of the positional parts of the simple sentence that underlies the structure of the complex sentence. E.g.: What you see is what you get. - What you see (the subject, the subject subordinate clause) is what you get (the object, the object subordinate clause).

According to the categorial principle, subordinate clauses are divided by their inherent nominative properties; there is certain similarity (but, again, not identity) with the part-of-speech classification of words. Subordinate clauses can be divided into three categorial-semantic groups: substantive-nominal, qualification-nominal and adverbial. Substantive-nominal subordinate clauses name an event as a certain fact, e.g.: What you do is very important; cf.: What is very important? Qualification-nominal subordinate clauses name a certain event, which is referred, as a characteristic to some substance, represented either by a word or by another clause, e.g.: Where is the letter that came today?; cf.: What letter? Adverbial subordinate clauses name a certain event, which is referred, as a characteristic to another event, to a process or a quality, e.g.: I won’t leave until you come.

The two principles of subordinate clause classification are mutually complementary: the categorial features of clauses go together with their functional sentence-part features similar to the categorial features of words going together with their functional characteristics. Thus, subordinate clauses are to be classified into three groups: first, clauses of primary nominal positions, including subject, predicative and object clauses; second, clauses of secondary nominal positions, including various attributive clauses; and third, clauses of adverbial positions.