Sentence as a communicative unit

Another approach to the description of syntactic semantics deals with the sentence as a communicative unit. The primary traditional semantic classification of sentence types is based on the communicative principle, traditionally defined as “the purpose of communication”. According to the purpose of communication, sentences are subdivided into declarative, interrogative and imperative. Declarative sentences are traditionally defined as those expressing statements, e.g.: He (didn’t) shut the window. Imperative sentences express inducements of various kinds (orders or requests), e.g.: (Don’t) Shut the window, please. Interrogative sentences express questions, or requests for information, e.g.: Did he shut the window? The American linguist Charles Fries contributed to a more precise description of communicative sentence types, classifying all the utterances on the kind of responses which they elicit. He distinguished, first, utterances which are followed by oral responses (questions, greetings, calls, etc.), most of them correspond to what is traditionally defined as interrogative sentences or make minor types of declarative and imperative sentences; second, utterances followed by action responses (requests or commands), i.e. imperative sentences in the traditional classification; and third, utterances which elicit signals of attention to further conversation (statements), i.e. declarative sentences. 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 as in My God!, which can be also characterized as “non-sentential utterances” or “pseudo-sentences”).

The further communicative description of utterances was undertaken at the end of the 1960s by J. R. Searle within the framework of the so-called “theory of speech acts”, on the basis of philosophical ideas formulated by J. L. Austin. Utterances are interpreted as actions or acts by which the speaker does something (the title of the book by J. L. Austin was How to Do Things with Words). On the basis of various communicative intentions of the speaker, J. R. Searle produced a detailed classification of so-called pragmatic utterance types (“pragmatic” means pertaining to the participants and the circumstances of the particular speech act). The two basic utterance types are defined as performatives and constatives (representatives): performatives are treated as utterances by which the speaker explicitly performs a certain act, e.g.: I surrender; 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. From the purely linguistic point of view, various speech acts correlate structurally and functionally with the three cardinal communicative types of sentences. Later the theory of speech acts developed into a separate branch of linguistics known as “pragmatic linguistics” (“pragmalinguistics”, or “pragmatics”); this approach is used in syntactic studies as complementary to the classification of the grammatically distinguished communicative types of sentences.

Another major development in modern syntax is connected with the introduction of paradigmatic analysis of the sentence. Traditionally, the sentence was studied only syntagmatically, as a string of nominative parts. F. de Saussure stressed the fact that paradigmatics is quite natural for morphology, while syntax should be studied primarily as the linear connections of words. Regular paradigmatic description of syntax started in the middle of the 20th century in the wake of the transformational grammar theory of N. Chomsky, who, as was mentioned before, distinguished deep and surface levels of syntactic structures, transformationally connected with each other. The genuine sentences in “surface” speech are analyzed as derived from kernel sentences, or “basic syntactic patterns”, in “deep” speech through as number of syntactic transformational steps, or syntactic derivational procedures, which include morphological arrangement of the sentence parts, the use of functional words, the processes of substitution, deletion, positional arrangement, and intonational arrangement.