FORMAL CONSTRAINTS VS. COGNITIVE AND COMMUNICATIVE FUNCTIONS OF PARTS OF SPEECH IN ENGLISH

Аннотация

ion, is the same for all languages and human beings. The language system is a semiotic system. As such, it is the result of the interplay of two essentially independent forces. Thus, entities of grammar, including parts of speech, have a purely formal side determined by the constraints imposed on any semiotic system. At the same time, this formal side is not empty, but is laden with cognitive and communicative content. In more concrete terms: Grammatical categories, relations, constructions and operations are necessary for a semiotic system to operate, and they do have some purely formal properties. At the same time, those are categories like tense, relations like the indirect object relation, constructions like the causative construction and operations like nominalization; and none of these is purely formal, all of them have their semantic side. Putting it yet another way: in a semiotic system, everything concerning the sign as a whole is meaningful. The association of form and function in language is not biunique. A classification of semiotic entities, including grammatical ones, by semantic criteria yields results different from a classification based on formal criteria. This is true for word classes just as for any other grammatical category. 0https://scientific-jl.com/luch/ 1 8 Часть-39_ Том-1_ Февраль-2025 For instance, there is, in English, a distribution class that includes noun phrases (like a bright girl), proper nouns (like Linda) and certain pronouns, among them personal pronouns (like she), while it excludes nominals (like bright girl), common nouns (like girl) and other pronouns (like one; cf. a bright one with a bright she). The members of that distribution class have no common semantic basis that would not also be shared by other kinds of nominal elements. And on the other hand, a semantic criterion such as denoting an act would subsume members of different word classes such as ask and question. Grammatical concepts, including parts of speech, may be defined at different levels of generality. The two levels that are of interest here are the language- specific and the interlingual (alias cross-linguistic alias typological) level. These are levels of abstraction. Thus, the English perfect has certain particular properties that it may not share with the perfect of any other language. It nevertheless instantiates an interlingual category of perfect, a concept which must be sufficiently abstract and prototypical in nature in order to fulfill its methodological function of serving in the description and comparison of more than one language. From there on, extension of the part-of-speech system is guided by universal and then increasingly language-specific structural constraints. The next step in the extension of the system is concerned with expanding the range of concepts used in reference and predication. All languages can do that, some languages, however, only at the level of modifying syntactic operations of attribution and adjunction. Now if a language opts for categorial uniformity, it needs modifiers. Here is another field where it can be economic to store prefabricated modifiers as a lexical class. This yields adjectives and adverbs, which make use of the structural device of modifying relationality. Similarly, the structural device of governing relationality is put to use in order to create subclasses of the classes generated so far which differ in their valency and thus afford more flexibility in syntagmatic combination. This 0https://scientific-jl.com/luch/ 1 9 Часть-39_ Том-1_ Февраль-2025 then opens a rich field of further subdivision according to grammatical selection restrictions and, thus, to the subcategory of the complement. Finally, the overall burden of categorization and relationalization cannot be born by the lexicon alone. There must be flexibility in recategorizing items and putting them into new relations. Apart from the purely isolating language, all languages derive minor classes from the lexical classes by grammaticalization. Their members help in pinning down the category that an expression belongs to, thus introducing redundancy into the message. Some of these minor classes, like demonstrative and interrogative pronouns, are again motivated by universal principles of communication. In principle, however, their organization is a matter of language-internal structure. The notion constituting the title of the present article – the nature of parts of speech – is not a unified notion. They are of very different nature.