COMMUNICATIVE DIVISION OF THE ENGLISH COMPOSITE SENTENCE IN COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE

COMMUNICATIVE DIVISION OF THE ENGLISH COMPOSITE SENTENCE IN COGNITIVE PERSPECTIVE

Author:  Svetlana G. Vinogradova

Affiliation:  Tambov State University named after G.R. Derzhavin

Abstract: 
The paper presents general provisions for communicative sentence division in cognitive perspective. We apply the provisions to the analysis of the English composite sentence – a linguistic reflection of a conceptual space sector of the English syntax. The author argues that communicative sentence division should be viewed as a result of metainterpretation understood in its narrow sense as a conceptual modification of the knowledge about some particular fragment of reality expressed by some sentence. Such modification is processed in order to realize which part of the above mentioned knowledge is given/ old and which is new for its subsequent transfer in the course of verbal communication. The paper also shows that in cognitive perspective communicative sentence division is a multifactorial process based on the apperception principle of learning, the principle of iconicity, the principles of profiling, foregrounding, and figure and ground distinction. The paper indicates that the verbal means of the division are due to the static and dynamic nature of cognition as an interpretative process and should be brought under modus or interpretive language categories. The analysis of the English composite sentence in discourse shows ambiguity in this sentence division which we explain by several reasons.

Keywords:  communicative sentence division, interpretation, metainterpretation, knowledge, composite sentence, cognitive, conceptual

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Pages:  5-13