Južnoslovenski Filolog (Jan 2014)
The preposition potential in formation of conjunctional means
Abstract
In the article the ability of preposition to form conjunction or its equivalent has been considered. The mechanism of denominalization has been shown on the Russian material with the involvement of the author’s observations on prepositions in the Belarusian language - the morphological form transformation in to the subordinate part of complex sentence. The author’s conception is: 1) the syntaxeme is the actant position in the sentence; 2) the syntaxeme consists of the formant (preposition + flexion) and nominative component (substantive); 3) at the level of the complex sentence the same actant position may take the predicative unit (subordinate part of the complex sentence); 4) the formant of the predicative syntaxeme in transforms is the conjunctional combination “preposition + demonstrative pronoun that + subordinate part conjunction“. The preposition at case syntaxeme transformation in to predicative does not change its function, but it is included in to the conjunctional formant as one of the elements of more complex formant - conjunctional combination. Each element of the conjunctional combination fulfills its function: the preposition still forms the syntaxeme, but with more complex nominative component as predicative unit, the pronoun that is “flection“ of this nominative component (subordinate part), and the conjunction acts as the explicator, providing grammatical connection of the nominative component of syntaxeme with the “flexion“ and the preposition. It is noted that the mechanism and the results of denominalization depend on the syntaxemes repertoire and character and on the preposition meaning: the same preposition, with different meaning has different conjunctional potential. In to the mechanism of denominalization are involved categorematic names (classifiers), which initially are used as structural vocabulary for forming secondary prepositions, and together with them, for forming conjunctional combinations. The methods of transformation of prepositional-nominal syntaxeme in to conjunctional-predicative reveal more conjunctional means than there are in the existing grammatical and lexicographical descriptions.
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