Sentence Typology: Communicative Purpose Approach. Tradition and Novelties

Abstract

The paper offers the analytical review of the author’s typologies of sentences based upon the purpose of their expression and presented in the East Slavic grammars from the early XIX century to the present day. The main focus falls on the systematization of the parameters of the author’s classifications, which enabled distinguishing among the main approaches to the typology of sentences based upon the communicative purposes: the content – based approach with the analysis of the sentence expression; a formal-semantic one, which is based upon the formal means of representation of the speaker’s purpose, in particular the order of words in the sentence, the form of the members of the sentence, as well as the methodological semantics of verb forms; an approach that presupposes the analysis of the intentions and ties of speakers and subjective components of speech; intonation-punctuation approach; in particular a modal approach based on the concept of “syntactic modality”; modal-intentional approach, which is dominated by the communicative intention of the speaker and discursive-pragmatic approach to the interpretation of communicative types of sentences, which takes into account the most hefty aspects of the speech acts theory. Such a classification, as well as a detailed review of the author’s typologies proved correct to divide the sentences according to expression purpose into three main types: sentence-information (informative); motivating sentences (directives); sentence-question (quisitive). Sentences of desire (optatives) are more appropriately included in the inter-category modifications of sentences-information and prompting sentences. We also proved that among all it is important to single out the content of the sentence-statement, syntactic models of representation of this content, communicative intentions and purpose of the speaker as well as the cognitive environment of sentences-statements.