Abstract
A possible approach to the description of the pragmatic structure of sentences is described. It is proposed that from the point of view of pragmatics every sentence should be treated as a message whose function is to modify the receiver's knowledge in a certain way. In the same sense as words are semantically complex entities that should be analyzed into more elementary semantic units, sentences should also be analyzed into elementary pragmatic components - elementary messages. Every elementary message represents a certain operation upon the receiver's memory. The pragmatic structure of a sentence may be explicated as a (typically non-linear) sequence of elementary message where every adds its ‘piece of information’ to the memory structures created by the previous messages. The theory of communicative dynamism, as elaborated by the Prague school of linguistics, is used as a source for establishing the sequences of messages corresponding to a given sentence. Some other criteria for establishing elementary messages are also considered and the nature of the operations represented by these messages is discussed.
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