LEXICAL UNITS WITH THE PROPOSITIONAL MEANING AS A TOOL OF SEMANTIC EXTENSION OF THE SIMPLE SENTENCE

The article analyses polypropositional simple sentences, which demonstrate the asymmetry of the linguistic sign, and several means of information compression, which reveal the relationship between lexicon and grammar, the impact of syntactic structures on the semantic extension of lexical units and their ability to name the state of things. The research of these syntactic units was based on colloquial speech, academic spoken interaction, as well as recent newspaper publications and their web versions. The active usage of polypropositional sentences in the media is accounted for not only by the reasons of speech effort economy (because of the increased information flow) but also by ideological reasons, which are favourable for the return of the Newspeak with its denotative ambiguity and uncertainty. The process of language ‘bureaucratization’ is of importance as well. The semantic and syntactic processes of nominalization and attributization make it possible to add secondary propositions to the sentence, which do not possess independent mechanism of actualization besides the actual basic proposition. Nominalized constructions possess their own structure, isomorphic to the situations they name. The  lexical units with the propositional meaning, deverbatives and deadjectivals, are their nucleus. Nominalized constructions are used in simple sentences with the certain types of predicates: connectives, mainly with the verbs of relationship, which remind of logical link words; causative and modal predicates (verbs of mental action, verbs of emotional state, speech verbs, verbs of perception, etc.). Information compression can be carried out within a simple sentence with the help of a concrete noun that acquires the ability to name some state of things in the sentence; such concrete names expand their meaning. Communicative features that activate potential predicative ‘abilities’ of adjectives, become vital for semantic extension of the polypropositive sentence formed by semantic and syntactic process of attributization. Having become the communicative focus of the utterance, they perform the function of the deep predicate, which is logically connected with the main predicate of the basic proposition.