Choosing the Syntactic Construction: Type of Situation and Other Factors

Abstract

The syntax can be considered as a system of representations of situations. The correlation between syntax and semantics is not always one-to-one correspondence. A particular syntactic representation is determined not only by the real-world parameters of the situation represented and by the speaker’s perception but also by a number of pragmatic factors, namely, the communicative organization of utterance, emphasis, etc. The paper deals with the interaction of semantic and pragmatic factors in choosing a particular syntactic structure (considering some constructions in Russian). For many situations, there is more than one possible syntactic representation, including those with identical lexical components; the analysis of such data reveals the inherent semantics of syntactic structures, contrastive contexts and non-standard usage being particularly informative in this aspect.