SIMILE STRUCTURE AS AN INCOMPLETE SUBORDINATE CLAUSE

Abstract

The purpose of the present research is to improve the accuracy of simile structures system of the Russian language, putting the focus on the grammatical nature of comparisons. The object under the study is simile as a figure of speech and other comparison constructions in the composition of sentences. The subject of the study is the grammatical nature of a simile, and its place in the syntactic system of the Russian language. The study was conducted at the philological faculty of the Odessa I. I. Mechnikov National University on the basis of long-term observations of the grammatical analysis of such sentences in the practice of teaching the syntax of the modern Russian language. The study of the data has been carried out by methods of structural, semantic and functional analyses, as well as methods of observation and transformation analysis. As a result of the conducted theoretical research and observations related to the practice of teaching the syntax of the Russian language, the following conclusions have been drawn.The traditional approach considering a simile as a non-predicative construction expending the structure and semantics of a simple sentence is incorrect. Set simile expressions which are not separated intonationally and not marked with commas, are non-predicative. These explicit comparisons are not lexemes but syntaxemes, in other words, word combinations with comparative conjunctions. They function as non-detached members of the sentence. Made up comparisons which are intonationally isolated, and, if presented in a written form, are detached by commas, are potentially predicative, which is recovered from the context. Such a unit is an elliptic subordinate clause, contextually incomplete, within a compound sentence; if this unit is reloaded by some components of the main part being its anaphora and forms of the inflectional paradigm of these components. The simile of this type of structure are capable of expressing circumstantial relations of direct or indirect comparison. Detached comparison structures are semi-predicative ones expending the construction and the semantics of a simple sentence, if it is necessary to use new context-embedded words, introducing new meanings into the construction to make them fully-predicative. The predicative comparison structures are the least problematic when it comes to structural qualification; they function as subordinate part of complex sentences.