The autonomous word as a component of a compound predicate in European languages

Abstract

The article is devoted to a typology of the compound predicate in a number of European languages (English, German, French, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Turkish and Bashkir), which goes a long way to building a theory of language in general and a theory of the sentence in particular. The method of our analysis is based on contrasting inductively selected verbal structures of some natural languages with a language etalon. The aim is to establish factors determining the positional and syntactic autonomy of the word. Positional autonomy is related to the word’s ability to change position in a sentence according to a certain degree of word order freedom, while syntactic autonomy suggests the ability of a word to function as an isolated one-word sentence. An ideal model characterized by absolute positional and syntactic word autonomy stands for the mentioned language etalon. It is assumed hypothetically that languages with a maximum possible free word order enjoy a marked word autonomy, unlike languages with a fixed word order being suggestive of reduced word autonomy. The hypothesis is verified on the basis of optional sampling of various types of the predicate in three temporal forms of the verb representing the category of person. The research ascertains dependence of word autonomy on agreement of grammatical form and meaning. The index of agreement determined as a ratio between the signifier and the signified in the paradigm of the verb conjugation enables to reveal the autonomy degree for each language of contrast. According to the decrement of autonomy the contrasted languages can be disposed in the following order: (Polish, Turkish, Bashkir) → (Russian) → (Italian) → (German) → (French) → (English).