The communicative and pragmatic values of sentences in theoretical linguistic description and in practical language teaching

The purpose of the research is to reveal communicative and pragmatic types of sentences which belong to living, productive syntactic means of language and should find the due reflection both in theoretical linguistic description and in practical language teaching.

In order to achieve the aim the following objectives were set:

• ^    to define the functions and types of sentences;

• ^    to analyze structural peculiarities of English sentence;

• ^    to reveal communicative and pragmatic values of sentence.

The scientific novelty of the research. In the work an attempt was made to reveal and describe the communicative and pragmatic values of the English sentence.

A sentence is a grammatical unit consisting of one or more words that bear minimal syntactic relation to the words that precede or follow it. A sentence can include words grouped meaningfully to express a statement, question, exclamation, request, command, or suggestion.

There are many definitions of the sentence and these definitions differ from each other because that the scientists approach from different viewpoints to this question. Some of them consider the sentence from the point view of phonetics, others - from the point of view of semantics (the meaning of the sentence) and so on. According to the opinion of many grammarians the definition of the sentence must contain all the peculiar features of the smallest communicative unit.

The sentence is the immediate integral unit of speech built up of words according to a definite syntactic pattern and distinguished by a contextually relevant communicative purpose.

Any act of communication presupposes existence of the speaker and the hearer. The meaning of person is expressed by the category of person of verbs. They may be expressed grammatically and lexico-grammatically by words: I, you, he...

Reality is treated differently by the speaker and this attitude of the speaker is expressed by the category of mood in verbs. They may be expressed grammatically and lexically (may, must, probably...)

According to the same authors the three relations - to the act of speech, to the speaker and to reality - can be summarized as the relation to the situation of speech.

A sentence can also be defined in orthographic terms alone, i.e., as anything which is contained between a capital letter and a full stop.

Semantics refers to the meaning of words in a language and the meaning within the sentence. Semantics considers the meaning of the sentence without the context. The field of semantics focuses on three basic things: “the relations of words to the objects denoted by them, the relations of words to the interpreters of them, and, in symbolic logic, the formal relations of signs to one another (syntax)".

Semantics is just the meaning that the grammar and vocabulary impart, it does not account for any implied meaning.

Learning the difference between semantic and pragmatic meaning can help new English language learners avoid miscommunication and misunderstandings. Learn about the difference between the two terms and review examples of each.

When learning the English language, understanding the differences between semantic and pragmatic meaning can be a valuable tool to maximize your linguistic ability. Although both are terms used in relation to the meanings of words, their usage is drastically different.

Pragmatic meaning looks at the same words and grammar used semantically, except within context. In each situation, the various listeners in the conversation define the ultimate meaning of the words, based on other clues that lend subtext to the meaning.

New English language learners need to learn how to understand the pragmatic meaning of the sentence in order to avoid miscommunications. Some ways to make the transition easier is by learning phrases and idioms that are commonly said, but whose true meanings differ from the semantic meaning.

We focus on the pragmatic strategy that evidential facilitate.

Firstly we assume that sentence meaning, the information encoded by linguistic expressions, can be divided up into two separate and distinct parts. On the one hand, a sentence typically encodes a proposition, perhaps complex, which represents a state of the world which the speaker wishes to bring to the addressee's attention. This aspect of sentence meaning is generally referred to as the propositional content (or common meaning) of the sentence. On the other hand, there is everything else: mood markers such as the declarative structure of the sentence, and lexical expressions of varying length and complexity. It is on this “everything else” that we focus. Specifically, we propose that this non-propositional part of sentence meaning can be analyzed into different types of signals, what we have called Pragmatic Markers (cf. Fraser 1990), which correspond to the different types of potential direct messages a sentence may convey. These pragmatic markers, taken to be separate and distinct from the propositional content of the sentence, are the linguistically encoded clues which signal the speaker's potential communicative intentions.

What we have presented above should be viewed as support for three claims.

The first claim is that the sentence (read “semantic”) meaning is comprised of two parts: a propositional content; and a set of pragmatic markers.

The second claim is that the four types of messages exhaust the messages encodable by aspects of sentence meaning: a single basic message (the message which uses the propositional content of the sentence as its message content); commentary messages (messages commenting on the basic message); parallel messages (messages which are in addition to the basic message); and discourse messages (messages signaling the relationship between the basic message of the current sentence and the preceding discourse).

The third claim is that corresponding to these message types are pragmatic markers which signal the particular message.

These claims may be correct, in which case we will have made progress, or they may be false. There may be aspects of sentence meaning other than the propositional content and pragmatic markers.

"Экономика и социум" №4(95) 2022