Role of Articles in Formation of Communicative Perspective of English Utterance

Abstract

The subject matter of the paper is related to the well-known general problem of the functional perspective of the English utterance, the latter, however, is seen here as a two-fold phenomenon, splitting within itself into semantic relations between the communicative elements, depending on the use of articles, and the informative structure of the utterance, which is not the target of the paper. The author examines the characteristics of the English articles, enabling to treat them as linguistic units which form the syntax of speech, the latter being differentiated from syntactic models being part of language. Thus the paper clearly distinguishes language and speech. Special attention is given, on the one hand, to semantic relations between the communicative elements of the utterance and, on the other hand, to semantic relations between such communicative elements, articles being the main linguistic units molding communicative elements proper and semantic relations between them.