RECURRENT ENGLISH STRUCTURES VIEWED AS GRAMMAR CONSTRUCTIONS

Abstract

The article is focused on English grammatical constructions considered within the framework of cognitive-discourse analysis and viewed along the perspectives of Construction Grammar theory. The analysis is directed upon recurrent structures in English, i.e. structures that are regularly produced and therefore functionally significant for the English language, considered as idiomatic unity of form and meaning, and, as a rule, having propositional content. The study of the constructional features of language units is supplemented by mental schematization of their content based on the idea that the structures under analysis represent the language techniques employed in interpreting referent scenes. The grammar of constructions as a research issue dealing with organizing language units that belong to various linguistic subsystems (phonological structure, lexicon, grammar), has become the subject of quite a number of cognitively and structurally oriented research (called, for example, constructional grammar, linguistics of constructions, Construction Grammar). The study of recurrent linguistic units from the point of view of their structural and cognitive features allows us to consider the types of organization of linguistic units that are regularly reproduced in a language in a semiotic aspect: the content plan of constructions is propositions (or their contractions) as concepts of referent situations comprehended by the speaker. From the point of view of the specificity of a particular language, it is significant to involve in the study of the material of the English language, in which the constructional mechanisms are more obvious than, for example, in the Russian language, due to the fact that tendencies towards analyticism and features of the isolating system have become typologically significant in English. For this reason, the study of the structural features of linguistic units in the English language, it seems, can bring some clarity to the specifics of its structural organization. Since modern linguistic theory has a poly-paradigmatic character, several of its most important interpretations are closely intertwined in the study of the essence of language. They include the perspective of its interpretation as a cognitive mechanism, as a verbal semiotic system and as an ethnocultural socio-discursive phenomenon. In modern studies, the structural features of linguistic units are supplemented by the aspect of mental schematization of their content. Mental schemes fix the mental images of cognizable situations formed in consciousness - mental representations, which can then be described in terms of different types of schemes in the Bartlett sense (situations, scenes, scenarios, frames, etc.). The research material is examples of English structures extracted during a targeted sample from the British National English Corpus, as well as from Internet sites. The main methods of analysis are semantic, conceptual and collocation. The aim of the study is to find procedures for analyzing the structures of the English language that meet the criteria for grammatical structures, as well as to identify a general approach to the analysis of syntactic and word-formation types of structures. As the main results of the study, conclusions are proposed about the essence of categorizing and semiotic functions of recurrent structures, which seem to most fully demonstrate the conceptual essence of the analyzed structures.