Alfred Nobel University Journal of Philology (Dec 2020)
SYNTACTIC HOMONYMS IN THE MODERN RUSSIAN LANGUAGE (VARIABILITY AND RE-DECOMPOSITION)
Abstract
The aim of the article is to analyse syntactic homonyms in the modern Russian language, mainly variability and re-decomposition. Generally homonyms are understood as a sound coincidence of various linguistic units, the meanings of which are not related to each other. Such a semantic relationship between words can take place at all levels of the structure of the language, but a lot of problems with an adequate interpretation of some text arise when it is saturated with syntactic homonyms, constructions built on models that formally coincide in terms of expression with incompatibility of their syntactic content, and, accordingly, in meaning. The ambiguity of the content and its correspondence to the syntactic structure of one or another statement was established mainly by teachers and students of universities in Ukraine, with a different, but, as a rule, understandable to persons who speak Russian, word order, one way or another corresponding to the common sense of the corresponding meaning of a sentence under the review. Syntactic homonyms, like any other types of homonyms (lexical, morphological, phonetic, etc.), are directly caused by asymmetry in the structure of the language, i.e. deviation from orderliness, regularity, uniformity in the structure and functioning of linguistic units, reflecting one of the main features of the plan of expression in natural human language. In this case, a variety of messages were used as factual material in various publications and oral statements of representatives of various professions and on different occasions, including constructions of such types: 1) There was a complaint that your dog is chasing a boy on a bicycle; 2) The professor who arrived from Kiev yesterday did not appear for classes (he arrived yesterday or did not appear for classes yesterday; 3) The cat climbed into the window with a window leaf; 4) In our institution children can study from 5 to 18 years old. Thus, the author considers one-to-one correspondence in the system of syntactic homonyms as a set of linguistic units being a special case of certain semantic relations between individual words, including syntactic constructions, which apparently should be opposed to real homonyms, when, as already noted, there is necessarily an asymmetry of the content plan and the plane of expression in the language and the sound coincidence of various linguistic units, the meanings of which are not directly related to each other. With syntactic homonyms, the semantic structure of a phrase is far from always determined only by its syntactic parameters, and in particular by the order of words and formal hierarchical relations between the members of the sentence. In this case one may encounter not only a typical situation when a change in the order of words in a given statement leads to a change in its semantic content, but also with a situation where a change in the linear structure of a sentence does not significantly change its semantic structure. Therefore, it seems to us quite possible, and in some cases even necessary, to talk about two different manifestations of syntactic homonyms with at least two different semantic relations, which were qualified as non-standard (non-systemic) syntactic relations, such as re-decomposition, if any other word order established or fixed by the communicants does not essentially change the general content of the message as a whole, or as variability, when a new word order can be put in accordance with a completely different content.
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