Interpretation of grammatical phenomena from the point of view of the perspective: setting the problem

Abstract

The purpose of the article is the interpretation of grammatical phenomena from the point of view of perspective. This allows you not only to name the facts of the language, but also to explain them. It is shown that the principle of perspective allowed grammarians of the Middle Ages to explain the differentiation of words as forms of speech: a verb having the forms of mood and tense reflects an internal perspective, a noun – an external one. Verbal and nominal categories can also be considered from the point of perspective: the perfect aspect reflects an external perspective, the imperfect aspect reflects an internal one. The principle of perspective in the evaluation of syntactic phenomena allows us to differentiate two types of sentences according to the presence of illocutionary force in them, videlicet, illocutive independent and illocutive independent clauses. Through the usage of descriptive, comparative and transformation methods it is shown that illocutive independent clauses are not able to include modal markers which reflect the speaker's position: they are simple judgments and can be characterized by communicative monomaneity and the absence of temporal reference. The most sentences of this type contain a description of the permanent properties of things/objects/phenomena of the surrounding world. They can be considered as sentences with an external perspective. On the contrary, illocative independent clauses are always complex judgments, they are communicatively binary and have a temporal reference. As a rule, they contain either a description of the variable properties of things of the surrounding world, or actions/processes. These properties are used to characterize the internal perspective. The proposed approach allows us to reveal the deep nature of sentences with an external and internal perspective, to explain the possibility of using modal markers in a sentence, to explain the necessary conditions under which the principle of internal perspective can be realized in an utterance.