7. Concluding remarks
The central idea of this paper is the existence of an operational information level in speech. We have seen that the role of operational information depends on the composition of the states that form it. Being coupled, operational states form structures which accompany semantic information and categorize it as a word class and word form and so can be considered as the basis of sentence grammar. The noncoupled single operations (negation and hyponymization) create information units without recourse to additional semantic information. Single operational states determine quantitative characteristics of a group of adjectives and nouns and introduce the actual moment of time. Used as alternative increments of a same noun, the single quantitative state and the single elective one underlie the linguistic meaning of the class of numerals.
The operational structures serve as information units’ parameters in speech. The parameters attached to an information unit are not directly linked to the quantity and elective ability of the information. By detecting simple operational structures and formation of complex operational structures as parameters of semantic information, one determines the interaction of information units in the sentence and thereby undertakes a language parametric nonsemantic description.
We found out that parametric characteristics successfully describe grammatical phenomena of the Russian language (from the noun plural and the verb aspect-tense forms to the syntactic use of words like infinitive, prepositions, conjunctions or nouns in the indirect cases). So our approach allows describing diverse grammatical phenomena with the same elements, which are operational states, and thereby considering the grammar of a language as a unified whole formed on a common ground.
The analysis with operational structures has led us to several particular discoveries. In this paper, we mentioned just two of them. Hyponymization is a covert grammatical phenomenon symmetrical to negation with the difference that negation is based on an elective relation and hyponymization is determined by a quantitative relation. The structures of Russian transitive verbs are determined by one of the types of substitution of a negative structure by the positive one.
According to our research of the Russian language, operational structures ensure a connection between all information units (except interjections), which apparently represents a universal nonsemantic mode of sentence formation. So one can anticipate new typological perspectives based on quantitative and elective relations between speech items. We suppose that a group of operational structures characterizing one language does not coincide with the ones in other languages. We can also infer, taking into account the existence of primary structures, a universal which can be formulated as follows: The lexical items that can be basically opposed in a sentence are nouns, verbs, and interjections. This inference conforms to the facts we know. “It is perhaps true that apart from nouns and verbs, interjections… are another word class found in all languages. … Indeed, as Schachter rightly observes: ʻAlthough there are a good many linguistic descriptions that fail to mention interjections, it seems likely that all languages do in fact have such a class of wordsʼ ” (Ameka 1992: 101).
Having the example of our research of the Russian language, on which this article is based, we can see that there is a limited number of operational structures and relations they form to describe linguistic information. So, language description with operational structures is able to reduce the large number of information units to a small number of description units, which is the goal of any scientific description.
Describing the quantitative aspect of the real world with equations, physicists describe the world itself. In contrast to the physicists’ description, the operational structures do not correlate with the real world. If real objects can be measured, i.e. determined with numerical quantities, information units described with operational structures can be determined by only one of the two quantitative relations – inclusion or equivalence – and so can’t be measured in that way. Unlike semantics, the main interest of which is how language is related to the things in the extra-linguistic world, we introduce operational structures, which describe not the world or understandings of experience but the information itself.
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