THE OBJECT CLAUSE AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SYNTACTICAL CONCEPT OF OBJECTIVITY

Abstract

The paper is dedicated to the study of a complex sentence with an object clause, which acts as a sign of the syntactic concept of objectivity. The study is based on the theory of syntactic concepts produced to describe a simple Russian sentence. The paper shows a possibility of applying this theory to the analyses of complex syntactic units in the modern German language too. A new approach to the study of the sentence within the framework of cognitive linguistics allows revealing the connection between a speaker’s conceptual worldview and a lexical content integrated into the structure of the sentence. Methods of the conceptual analysis and cognitive modeling applied in this research make it possible to analyze the syntactic concept of objectivity based on analyzing the means of its representation. As a result, the models of the complex sentence with objective clauses and their variants representing the concept of objectivity are identified and prototypical propositions and cognitive-pragmatic situations are distinguished. The study of the syntactic units based on the theory of syntactic concepts is of special interest because through the understanding of syntactically representative concepts objectified by certain sentence models and expressing certain situationally conditioned relationships, the linguostylistic and extralinguistic textual characteristics can be revealed.