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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